Seriously!

Summer is here. The heat is here — for those of us still in the tri-state area — and that means it’s time for summer lounging and summer reading. Let the book lists begin!

But instead prattling off “Top Ten Books You’ll Never See At the Beach” (next week’s posting, perchance?) or “My Favorite Books Of All Time That Everyone Should Read,” I decided to go with something more on the conventional side … A completely arbitrary list of books with interesting covers.

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I’ve spent the past year or so crafting a beautiful memoir: a story of the challenges I had to overcome growing up in post-apartheid South Africa, my hard core elocution training after my emigration to the US, and how I worked my way through a top university to my current job working in the Spitzer administration (whoops! Not so glamorous anymore!) But I’ve been having second thoughts about signing that contract pledging that everything I wrote is the unadulterated truth, in wake of the latest revelations of fabricated details published in memoirs. Yeah, it’s probably not a super great idea to legally verify as true something that is as false as Elizabeth Taylor’s eyelashes.

For those of you who need a brush-up on the literary scandals of the past few weeks and years, the New York Times has a nice summary. James Frey is arguably the most infamous, after his Oprah publicly scolded him when it was revealed that large portions of his “memoir”, A Million Little Pieces, were fabricated.

The falsified memoir saga continued last week with Margaret “Jones” (actual name Margaret Seltzer), the author of Love and Consequences. Her “memoir” tells the story of her hard childhood and adolescence in gang-ridden Los Angeles as a half Native-American, half white girl raised by a foster family, overcoming all her hardship to write about it. But when Ms. Jones nee Seltzer’s sister saw her picture in the New York Times, she told the truth about all the hardship that family had to overcome in their upper-middle class Los Angeles home.
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