Top Ten Fake Memoirs: What Can We Learn?

When I began this blog a little less than two years ago, I started a category called “memoir in the news” after several of the books on the “Top Ten Fake Memoirs List” located here made news for the wrong reasons.

I invite you to read the descriptions of these ten books. What do they have in common? What can we learn about the nature of truth from this list? Of the genre of memoir? Of the marketing dimensions of book publishing?

One wag said that the recent memoirs purporting to be survival tales of different ethnic groups get past the editors because they confirm mistaken impressions that the elite hold about “the other.” I’d love to have your thoughts on this subject.