Fudging on Memoirs Leads to Payback
Our BookExpo coverage prompted Joni Rodgers, who writes the Bookwoman blog for the Houston Chronicle, to write in and share her thoughts on another publishing industry hot topic near to our hearts: memoir writing. As the author of Bald in the Land of Big Hair, which chronicles her chemotherapy experiences, and as a ghostwriter on celebrity memoirs, Rodgers firmly believes that telling the truth about your life matters. “Memoirs stick,” she advises all her potential clients. “If you lie, you will walk about for the rest of your life with a wad of karmic gum in your hair.”
Not to mention angry relatives hovering in the background. Jonathan Lantry is the former step-brother of Jennifer Lauck, who wrote Blackbird a few years back and set off a mini-debate over how much literary invention in a memoir is too much. Well, like other people who became part of Lauck’s account of her hard-knock life, Lantry considers her “every bit James Frey’s equal in the practice of autobiographical mendacity,” only he’s set up a refutatory website to challenge her claims—in fact, he says he wants Lauck to be subject to “an investigation similar to that undertaken by The Smoking Gun [into James Frey]” and he’s even mulling the idea of a defamation suit against Simon & Schuster, maybe even “a class action suit against the publisher for continuing to promote Blackbird as truth.”
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