We all remember the James Frey scandal, where he admitted to gross exaggerations and out-and-out lies in his memoir, A Million Little Pieces. His appearance on Oprah took over the news so that Nasdijj went unnoticed. Supposedly a Navajo who grew up in a destitute Spokane reservation, Nasdijj is actually, as Sherman Alexie noted two years ago, just some white guy who got tired of writing porn.

Well here we are, and Misha Defonseca has said her Holocaust memoir was fake, that her parents were not in fact seized by Nazis, and that she did not in fact roam Europe during WWII, or even leave Brussels. She says, "This story is mine. It is not actually reality, but my reality, my way of surviving." (That raises the issue of truth, I guess. Tim O'Brien says quite eloquently that fiction can lead to important emotional truths. Of course, The Things They Carried is labeled a novel, marketed as fiction.) Finally, the NY Times has the story of Margaret Jones's Love and Consequences, a "memoir" of growing up in a gangland, actually written by Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a well-to-do section of Los Angeles.

I do think there's something despicable about a person publishing a fraudulent memoir, and something equally despicable about publishers telling authors, "You know, if this were a bit more exciting..." or "You know, if this were your life instead of a novel..." But I'm very interested in our reaction to memoirs as readers. Slap the label on a book (or movie), "Based on a True Story," and we're suddenly involved in a way we couldn't have been before? What does that say about our psychology?