BUSTED! Plagiarists, Fakers & Literary Hoaxes

[Deleted]

I heard that Augusten Burroughs' memoir was rumored to be fake; does anyone know?

I hate the apologist trend that memoirs don't HAVE to be real. I'm sorry, but yes, they do. Otherwise, they are a novel. I'm not saying that you have to document your life word-for-word; obviously no one remembers the exact conversation they had with their mom ten years ago. Dave Eggers did that whole dissection of his own memoir: "Well, actually, this happened a few weeks apart; well, actually, we weren't all in the room at the same time when we got that news." That does not bother me. But if you are going to completely fabricate life experiences that did not happen to you, then the book has no value as "memoir," because you are basing your musings, insightful and moving though they may be, on stuff you've imagined rather than stuff you've experienced and that has actually changed you personally. That's fine, but it's fiction. Saying it's not fiction is lying, and frankly I think people do it because if you write yet another mediocre book about the life of a drug addict's highs and lows on the street, it's just another mediocre book, but if you lie and say it *really happened*, you automatically get more cred and attention, and you don't have to put out the effort to write an original standout novel, or to establish realism and believability the way you do in a novel. Most memoirs I've read fall well below the quality of fiction, I guess because people are more forgiving when reading a personal narrative. Hoaxers are just lazy hack bastards, in conclusion. Except for in cases like the one Shalamar just said, because that's funny.

[Mutagen]

Watching Shattered Glass temporarily sucked me into a fascination with the Stephen Glass story - particularly reading some of the reviews and articles by Glass's former colleagues at The New Republic. There's a Slate article by Hanna Rosin (the basis for the Chloe Sevigny character in the movie) reviewing Glass's novel/memoir that's pretty anguishing to read - she is quite rightly bewildered, furious and upset at the way Glass betrayed her trust. According to Rosin he portrays everyone he worked with at the New Republic as dupes who were "never really his friends" in the first place. (As I say this I admit I have not actually read the book, so I obviously can't 100% confirm Rosin's view.)

And I'd read another article by Jonathan Chait, who actually collaborated with Glass on a few TNR articles, and who described it the most interestingly - which was that the closer you came to Glass, and the better you knew him, the more you believed him. In the article I read, Chait recounted a story of introducing Glass to his girlfriend, and the girlfriend was like "That guy seems kinda full of it." And Chait had a total "Huh? How can you say that?" reaction. Funnily enough I could almost see what he was talking about when I watched Glass himself on 60 Minutes - he really had perfected that inoffensively vulnerable act to an art.

Part of what was so freakish to me about Glass was that his made-up stories were just whoppers - he made up these whole outlandish people, places and stories that just flat-out did not exist and never happened, and I think he even mailed in a few letters to the editor from his fake story people. Contrast it with Jayson Blair, the New York Times reporter who was busted for plagiarizing, and his lies are at least somewhat logical, in the sense that they seem purely butt-covering. Blair's fake stories, at least you can sort of understand the motivation, as venal as it is; Glass's struck me as so bizarrely, pointlessly narcissistic.

Anyway, yeah... I went on a slight kick, once

[freddydingo]

I heard that Augusten Burroughs' memoir was rumored to be fake; does anyone know?

Not fake, exactly, but wildly distorted and exaggerated. He recently had to pay a fairly hefty settlement to the family of the psychiatrist he'd lived with as a child because of this.

[incognito]

I followed both the Kaavya Viswanathan and JT LeRoy stories very closely.

My thoughts on each (like you're interested…heh):

Kaavya Viswanathan

I read a lot of articles on her that came out before the plagiarism scandal. It was funny to contrast those articles to the ones that came out afterwards. When she was asked about her favorite books (pre-KaavyaGate), she was mentioning books like, "Oh, The Shadow Lines by Amitav Ghosh! He's one of my professors! I need to ask him for an autograph!" Post-KaavyaGate, when she had to come up with a plausible excuse for everything, she said, "It was all unintentional! In high school, I read two books by Megan McCafferty and they spoke to me in a way that few books ever did!" For the record, I don't think there's anything wrong with liking chick lit, or liking wildly different types of books. But I do think she was careful not to mention that kind of book previously, and instead stuck to safe and "respected" books, because she didn't want to come across as silly or vapid.

And she was also insisting that her parents were nothing like the parents in the book. I kinda got a different impression from the articles. Just the vibe that her parents gave off. When her mother was asked about Kaavya, she said, "Oh, when she was three years old, she was a great reader and an extensive thinker (incognito sez: or maybe it was "extensive reader and great thinker"…I'm paraphrasing from memory)! When she was in the third grade, she loved horses, so she wrote a book called Pinewood Stables. It was about 100 pages." It was like she had memorized a list of Kaavya's accomplishments to rattle off at the slightest encouragement. And an extensive thinker…WTF? That's slightly less egregious than Katie calling Suri a "strong woman", I guess. But a 3-year-old, while capable of your occasional "profound" statement in the vein of "Kids say the darnedest things", is not a great thinker. Unless he's Sho Yano or David Smith (child prodigies).

She's also part of a "social club" at Harvard, the Isis Club. Right. I have my issues with these social clubs.

And her excuse, that she unintentionally copied everything because of her photographic memory, is bull. Certain chunks were switched very slightly, enough to tell me that it was deliberate. For example, she once changed a paragraph that mentioned Psychology class so that it instead said Human Evolution class (and trust me, Psychology worked so much better in context). Hell yes, her copying was intentional!

JT LeRoy

This story was amusing in a way, because I got a delicious sense of schadenfreude in seeing so many annoying celebrities suckered into it. And the way they were scrambling around, trying to preserve their dignity by "applauding" the hoax after it was uncovered, saying that it was a great trick and that it didn't take away from the books…yeah right. You just know they were silently grinding their teeth, angry at being duped.

And crazy Winona even claimed to have known JT before he got famous. Heh heh heh…

I personally think that, no matter what anyone claims, JT's books only had the resonance and attention they did, because of his purported identity. So yes, his persona did greatly affect his works and how he was received. His books might have been shelved in fiction, but it's disingenuous IMO to claim that they weren't closely, perhaps inextricably, tied with his real-life identity.

I also heard about the Anthony Godby Johnson debacle when it unfolded. That was a doozy as well.

[luciano]

And her excuse, that she unintentionally copied everything because of her photographic memory, is bull. Certain chunks were switched very slightly, enough to tell me that it was deliberate. For example, she once changed a paragraph that mentioned Psychology class so that it instead said Human Evolution class (and trust me, Psychology worked so much better in context). Hell yes, her copying was intentional!

Seriously. Some of the stuff was so blatant. That's not having internalized details - that's holding an already published book with one hand and typing with the other.

[Deleted]

Wow, she sure internalized many, many large chunks from several different novels, there. It's nice that the passage about shopping for "a pink tube top emblazoned with a glittery Playboy Bunny" stuck with her so. Some things you just read and they stick with you forever!

Ethics aside, how stupid do you have to be to plagiarize - repeatedly! - within the exact same genre?

[Mutagen]

I don't understand the mentality behind plagiarism, period, whether it's in school or writing a novel. Not because I'm a particularly moral person... but because I'm lazy. Doesn't it seem like an equal amount of work to cover your tracks as it does to, like, actually write what you're taking credit for?

[jaghetersimon]

mutagen, what excuses did the New Republic people give for not catching onto Glass's lies? In the movie, they talk about how he forged his notes, but he must have done more to cover his tracks. Do you have any links to good articles about Glass? Thanks! ;D

That Kaavya girl just seems like such an obnoxious bitch. Like everyone you'd hate in high school. Just my humble opinion, of course. I love that Gawker wouldn't let her off the hook.

[incognito]

jaghetersimon: He also came up with a phony website for "Jukt Micronics", a company that he wrote about in a piece called "Hack Heaven." Except that the website was incredibly amateurish, especially for a company related to technology. There is a mirror of the site floating around somewhere, it should come up if you google the company (I think).

[intlschizo]

incognito said:

I also heard about the Anthony Godby Johnson debacle when it unfolded. That was a doozy as well.

Was that the kid who magically lived with HIV for over 20 years? Has he "died" yet?

Add Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra to my list of "books I gave the side eye to halfway in" list. People who make a buck selling fake child abuse pisses me off!