Hoax Memoir Spectacular!

Yes, let's go back to the glory days of 2006 when you couldn't buy good jeans to save your life.

Welcome to Your Wrong About.

I'm Sarah Marshall, and today we have a very special April Fool's Day episode with our pal Chelsea Weber Smith.

Kelsey is the host of the wonderful podcast American Hysteria.

You can hear me on there talking about chicken soup for the soul.

And in keeping with the theme of books that seem a little bit unbelievable, we're talking today about hoax memoirs.

Just like last year, this time on April Fool's Day 2024, we were talking about some of our favorite hoaxes, including the Loch Ness Monster and my personal favorite, the spaghetti tree.

We are talking today about a bouquet of hoax memoirs including the first hoax memoir that rocked my world, James Fry's A Million Little Pieces.

We're going to start with that and bring in our frequent guest star Oprah and then move on to the fake Holocaust memoir, the fake gang member memoir, and to close with the fake child prodigy memoir.

This was such a fun episode for me to do because we got to get into really some of the bigger questions about what it means to create, what it means to be creative, what truth really means in art and where we really need it, and what deeper truths we can maybe unearth from ourselves by just saying how it feels rather than trying to create a documentary record of what happened.

And also how the truth is a shy little creature worth winning over and that you probably can't do it if millions of dollars are on the line.

We recently put out an episode on what's bringing you joy in this strange year of 2025.

And I just wanted to thank again everybody who sent in a story, everybody whose story we used or didn't use, everybody who thought about sending one in, but then didn't.

You're important too.

They were all wonderful and we're all trying to reach out and find each other.

And it helps.

I think all of the reaching counts for something.

So thank you for reaching with us.

And thanks for continuing down this road.

We also have a March bonus out that I'm so excited to share with you.

We have two legendary guests, celebrity correspondent Eve Lindley and the host of sentimental garbage, Caroline O'Donoghue, talking about Marilyn Monroe's happy birthday, Mr.

President, dress and that time Kim Kardashian wore it and how we all felt

so very many feelings.

And we're going to talk about dresses and feelings and feelings about dresses and stardom and girl culture.

And it was such a fun romp and I hope that you join us and come romp around.

Here in these parts, it's spring.

We appear to have made it through another winter.

And if you're in the upper Midwest, then you will have officially made it through in about six weeks.

And thank you for making it through.

So here is your episode.

We hope you like this one.

Welcome to Your Wrong About, the podcast where we talk about hoaxes, misinformation, and

why

books don't always tell the truth.

And with me today is Kelsey Weber Smith.

Oh, thrilled to be here.

Thrilled to be hoaxed by you and learn of the hoaxes.

I have a little glass of wine, which I don't usually do, but I keep disclosing that.

It's St.

Patrick's Day, after all.

It's you're right as an American to throw up on an Irish person.

Although I am British, so

you know, do it that way, you will.

We won't get into that.

But yeah, I'm just happy to get to sit back and be told.

I enjoy being told things.

It's exciting.

Yeah.

And I hoaxed you last year.

Really, we did kind of a rundown of just some of my favorite hoaxes, including Nessie, of course, an alzheimer,

and the spaghetti farmer hoax.

Of course, a beautiful one.

And today I wanted to talk about hoax memoirs, which is one of my favorite topics and which is also integral to both of our fields in many ways, one of them being the satanic panic, which

we couldn't have without the hoax memoir, let's be real.

No, I mean, it was a prolific time for people that wanted us to believe that babies were being buried in abandoned parking lots.

Yeah.

Really a thriving industry.

And are there like any hoax memoirs that have hoaxed you?

Are there any that you're attached to or any that kind of in your research history stick out to you?

Because you also talk about a lot of different liars on your show, American Hysteria.

I do.

Lots of different liars.

You know, I mean, I'm always going to say Michelle remembers because it's the classic.

It's the one that brought you and I together as friends

on those hallowed steps of the AWP

convention.

But I, and I'm a big Mike Warrenke fan.

I did love doing the one with you that we did after our Jack Chick Chick Tract series about the vampire, the man who said he was a vampire and a werewolf.

You can learn about that on our episode called Interview with the Ex-Vampire.

And it's a whole lot of fun and absolutely stunningly ridiculous.

And yet, people will believe that men change into werewolves because of Jesus Christ somehow.

Yeah.

I didn't know about the Jesus connection but you know what do I know about werewolves.

Or rather I suppose I should say that

despite

the power of Jesus Christ,

people turn into werewolves and then they turn back into followers of Christ when they realize that it ain't all it's cracked up to be ripping your skin off and turning into a wolf.

Yeah.

Well, and that's what we're getting into because, like, we can't have the satanic panic without hoax memoir.

The satanic panic is started in many ways by Michelle Remembers, which comes out in 1980.

And as you know, Michelle Remembers is interesting for many reasons, but partly because I think it would not have been published if Sybil hadn't come out in the 70s, which was a huge bestseller.

And so when Michelle Remembers comes out, you have a publisher who's recently left a larger imprint who knows he has to come up with a profitable book and who ends up with the Michelle Remembers manuscript and is like, or the Michelle Remembers deal that becomes the manuscript and is like, yeah, this is it.

This is going to be the next Sybil.

And it's a Sybil thing where you have someone recovering memories of extreme abuse, which we know that American readers love to read about if they believe they're doing it in an instructive way rather than a sadistic way.

See also A Child Child Called It, a major bestseller of the 90s.

Right.

One of the most horrifying books that you can, you know, that like I remember seeing every third adult reading that in 1996, and then at a certain point, you realize what's actually in it and you're like, what?

Why are you doing this to yourself?

But so we have Michelle Remembers being positioned as something that is sure to be a bestseller because it's similar to a previous bestseller.

And this is important partly because it's just how bestsellers work and how book deals work, that like when you're young or when you're someone who doesn't end up sort of knowing how publishing or any kind of media really works, then like, I think you have this idea that

what happens in a book is like that the books that are published, especially from a nonfiction perspective, are just at least an attempt at a fairly objective rendering of the most interesting things being written year by year, as opposed to a kind of mathematical attempt to find the most similar but not too similar thing to whatever the last big thing was, which, of course, we saw with Twilight, you know,

needing an army of copycats to sort of continue that tidal wave.

And from that, we got the Vampire Diaries TV show and like a bunch of other lesser vampires, and then vampires were played out, and we had to move on to something else in Y literature that I can't remember.

Right, right.

Is it true, Sarah?

I feel feel like Emma Eisenberg, our friend and writer,

talked about how you had to actually pay for your own fact checker

in your writing.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is like stunning.

That's stunning, right?

Where it's just like, it's all on you, babe.

And I guess that's how we got a million little pieces.

And that is my first example.

I knew it.

I haven't even told you.

Yeah, because that's the example.

So, or it is for our generation.

A million little pieces, I think, was like the great memoir hoax moment of our generation and the one that people, like 50% at least of people alive think of when you mention a hoax memoir.

And what do you remember about that?

Well, I mean, I remember the cover, right?

It was so iconic.

It was great.

It was a great cover.

Great cover.

I feel like it was like this beautiful kind of cerulean blue and it was a hand covered in multicolored sprinkles, like it had been stuck to the hand.

Am I remembering it right?

This is a total memory.

Okay, yeah, yeah.

And then I remember that

it was, you know, about kind of like a descent into

hard drug use.

And I think the process of getting out of that, I know it was an Oprah book, and Oprah then, you know, kind of retracted her recommendation because, you know, it was found out that it was

exaggerated at the least, if not entirely fabricated.

But that's about all I know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the story is

quite silly to me, honestly, in the end, because it was a book that people responded so strongly to.

It didn't do that well before it was an Oprah pick.

And then after it was, it sold 1.7-ish million copies in 2005.

Dang.

Which is, you know,

remarkable for a book.

Like, books typically do not sell in the millions.

If a book sells 100,000 copies, that's extremely successful by book standards.

Yeah, you have to sell way less to get on the New York Times bestseller list.

It's a shockingly low number, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah, which is why it's so easy to con your way on there, which is a whole other episode because some people have.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And it was a book that people responded really strongly to.

And I remember just anecdotally, there was a girl in my high school who read it and who like got it from the library and who underlined it so much and was like so interactive with it that she had to get them a new copy.

Wow.

Wow.

And so, yeah, so A Million Little Pieces becomes this runaway success in 2005.

And it's basically sort of, and it's, it's got a lot of line breaks, right?

So it's like easy to read.

It's like reading a long poem.

It's almost like Rupee Carr in a way.

And it's James Fry basically describing being a no-good nick and someone who's been like a bad seed since he was a kid.

And he only had one friend, and then she got in a train accident when she was being driven home by a football player, and then he was all alone.

And,

you know,

he like faced hard time because he like hit a cop with his car.

He got in a big altercation and he was violent to the police.

He was facing up to eight years in maximum security prison.

He needed that modest mouse song.

You know what I'm talking about?

No.

Oh, yeah.

Someone drove off, sometimes that.

It's okay.

Yeah, that wasn't my best rendition, but anyway.

I mean, it's just, yeah, it's shocking to me that the mid-2000s are suddenly 20 years ago.

But I look at what was happening then and I'm like, yeah, I guess that feels like 20 years.

Well, what are you going to do?

But just, you know, that like he was someone who had bottomed out and gotten into like some serious addiction issues, ended up in jail where he, you know, read a bunch of literature and made the best of his time because, you know, yeah, it was selling a story of like, you know, after I was in jail, I just read Don Quixote and everything.

And it's like, I feel like jail is maybe not the best environment for reading Don Quixote.

I mean, I don't know either, but.

Hey, I guess we don't know.

Oh man, it's getting really chicken soupy in here.

Oh, is it?

I just mean it feels like it could be a chicken soup story so far, what you're telling me, like if it were just condensed into a couple of paragraphs.

How come?

And everyone should listen to those episodes because they're very fun.

But, like, yeah, how would that, what would the ending to that story be if it was in the chicken soup for the soul version?

I mean, I think it would just go, you know, it would be like tragic accident when you're young, descent into

somewhat explicit drug use.

And then by the will of yourself alone, by your bootstraps, you shall pull yourself up.

And everyone else better do it too, or they are lazy and stupid and deserve whatever bad things come to them.

And that would be the chicken soup version.

And that unfortunately is a thread in a million little pieces too, because there's this sort of motif of him like fighting and winning against addiction through sheer willpower, you know, and just being like this guy who's like so bad that he ends up in jail all these times, but then he's also so bad that he can beat his own addiction and then write a book about it.

And you can tell that I don't like that.

No, no, I don't care for it.

What is his DOC?

What's his drug of choice in that book?

I feel like all of them.

All of them.

Whatever's clever.

Yeah.

Yeah, basically.

And so what happens is that this book is a big bestseller.

It's a big bestseller partly because Oprah has picked it.

It's also the first contemporary book that she's picked in a couple of years, which is interesting to remember because she, for a while, I don't know if you recall, I was like laser focused on whatever Oprah was picking month by month when I was a tween and teen.

And for a while, she was just doing classic literature.

She was like, this week we're all reading Faulkner.

Wow.

I had no idea.

Oh, yeah.

She had a big Steinbeck phase, I think.

She like picked the grapes of wrath.

And I was just like, come on, Oprah, pick something fun.

Pick something more like the deep end of the ocean.

Yeah.

But wow, I'm, I'm, no, I didn't remember that at all.

That's shocking to me because it always felt like some kind of like secret society partnership that happened with the author.

It was a huge year for Steinbeck.

Yeah, I mean, seriously.

And, you know, I'm happy to have people reading Steinbeck.

Totally.

Oh, yeah.

And so, I mean, Oprah has an interesting role in all this because she, of course, as you know, was a huge mover and shaker in the satanic panic.

And she was one of the people whose job it was to have a daily afternoon talk show where you were competing against Donahue and everybody else.

And you had to bring on interesting people who would say sensationalistic stuff.

And so you inevitably had on people who were talking about Satanism because that was one of the sensationalistic things that was happening in the 80s.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, those old Oprah clips are stunning to watch where

there's just like an ex-Satanist who's just, or, you know, quote unquote, ex-Satanist who will just be like, I murdered six guys, stabbed them in the chest.

And Oprah's just like, you're brave.

Like, thank you for telling the truth.

And I'm just like, are the police coming?

Like, this man just admitted to several murders he allegedly committed.

And we're acting like

he's giving some sort of testimony that is positive because he's speaking up against it.

It's bizarre.

That is really fascinating, isn't it?

You had all these women swarming TV, mostly women, talking about all the babies they'd killed.

And no one was ever talking about the statute of limitations on baby sacrifice, which implies that people kind of knew there wasn't evidence for this, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because to be clear, never did we find evidence of a single baby sacrifice, you know, and like this is a dangerous country for babies.

Babies die all the time, preventably, but not because they're stabbed by Satanists, because we live in a society that doesn't care about their well-being or about mothers.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So Oprah's got some baggage, you know, and she's, she's promoted some half-truths.

And we know, you know, I mean, she, she has used her king-making powers quite freely.

She gave us Dr.

Oz.

She gave us Dr.

Phil.

She gave us

that wagon full of fat.

Yep.

I'll say it.

So anyway, that's kind of what this whole thing is about, right?

Because one of the ongoing questions slash scandals of memoir is how much are you allowed to make up?

And if we're being honest, like you do have to make stuff up because people do not, unless they're Mary Lou Henner and they have perfect autobiographical memory, then like most people can't remember most of what's happened to us, which is horrifying, right?

But if you think about like short-term memory, day-to-day memory, like most of what has happened to me in the last month, if I had to recall it, then I would be able to probably, and I would have a better chance of remembering it long term, I think, if my understanding of memory is basically correct.

But if I don't have to think about it again or refresh it, or if I don't write it down, like especially as an adult who has ingested enough fun chemicals to make my brain a little bit weaker than it used to be, I just won't remember a lot of the stuff that happens to me or a lot of the conversations that I have with people, you know, and especially if you're writing a memoir where people are having conversations in dialogue that aren't paraphrases, then like a lot of that has to be reconstructed.

And you can do your best to reconstruct it faithfully.

But at a certain point you are going to be imagining things.

Oh, absolutely.

I mean, anytime I read a memoir, I'm just like,

you don't remember that.

That's not what you said.

What are you, you know, I can't remember what happened to me earlier today.

I have the worst memory of anyone that I know.

And then I think about, you know, I mean, obviously there's so many problems with like evidence and the justice system.

But I just think about like when you're getting police interviewed, you're like dragged in and they're like, where were you on the 9th of October?

And you're just like, I don't know.

I have no idea.

And if I tell you what I think, you'll think I'm lying later.

I would just, I just, it's so funny when you watch true crime documentaries or whatever and people are never like, babe, I don't know what I was saying.

Are you kidding me?

Like, what am I a recall robot?

But, you know, I appreciate when people write memoirs, but as someone who has definitely tried to write memoirically,

that, you know, it's

creative writing.

Let's just say that.

Well, and also to speak of our baggage, you and I both have MFAs.

You have an MFA in poetry.

I have an MFA in fiction.

The rumors are true.

Both of us decided memoir was too hard.

How do you feel about truth and poetry?

Ooh, great question.

I think what's nice about poetry is it's kind of an impressionist version of truth, and it strikes on a level beyond fact and beyond like even storytelling.

It's something that just kind of, again, we know, rises up from the unified field, recently popularized by David Lynch, but it is just this,

you get to go with your subconscious.

And this is my version of poetry.

There are many kinds of poetry, but you get to be guided by something

else.

other than your kind of thinking mind, other than your intelligence or your, I mean, ego, we could call it.

I've been like really into meditation and listening to like Ram Dass and shit.

So I'm on, I'm on that level right now.

But I think, you know, something else takes over and it doesn't really, like truth is no longer

something

that is based in

like what happened.

It's based in what feels true.

And I and I think that that's really nice, but I don't think it's good when you're trying to impart wisdom to the masses about something that happened to you, allegedly.

Right.

Yeah.

And then there's the thing of like, why do certain types of writing have value, allegedly?

And with poetry, like, I don't think anyone has ever claimed that the most important thing about poetry is that it happened to somebody.

Although, by definition, it did, because to write about a feeling is to have the feeling.

Yeah.

Not that all poetry is about feelings, but you know, it is famous for feelings.

Well, I think what's nice about poetry is like a lot of times storytelling is amazing in poetry.

And

I just think that the story doesn't have to be anything other than like a felt memory that you get to kind of, I mean, manipulate is a strong word, but you get to retool to be an experience that you can imagine having.

And so it's a wonderful exercise in empathy as well.

But again, I think it can,

I've seen lots of examples of that going badly where people put themselves in other people's shoes in a way that feels a bit problematic.

Well, I believe we're going to get into that area as well.

Yeah, I'm sure.

I'm sure.

But how about fiction?

What do you have?

What do you think about fiction?

I mean, I love fiction.

And

I miss writing it.

And I...

Even when I haven't written fiction truly or seriously in years, I always have sort of little scenarios in my head, you know, that are just kind of ways of thinking about the world and sort of characters and scenarios.

And

I think similarly to you, I think that like some of my happiest memories are of just kind of being in that place when you're writing and when words are sort of happening and you feel like they're happening through you and you're just kind of letting them happen.

And it feels like there's just a part of you that's speaking without resistance and you don't have to think about what you're going to say next, which is what I'm used to in daily life.

And it's what you're incredible at is like,

you know, you speak from the fucking unified field.

I'll say it once.

I'll say it a thousand times.

Thank you for saying that.

I need to remember that.

And from my diaphragm when I can remember.

Yeah, of course.

Of course.

It's hard.

But right.

I think fiction is like a way of accessing the sides of yourself that you don't get to be in normal life.

I mean, fiction and fantasy are connected.

And, you know, all kinds of fantasy, I think, are sort of connected somewhere in the back of the mind.

And so I think there are, and, and yeah, we have gotten, I mean, what also comes to mind regarding Oprah is,

a few years ago, we had American Dirt right on the eve of the pandemic, which was, of course, a white woman writing a novel that was sort of predicated on the idea that it was this wonderful, you know, emotionally authentic story of a Mexican woman and her child who are trying to flee and get across the border because they survived a shootout by narcos at a concinera.

Like, I didn't write the stupid thing.

Yeah,

yeah.

And it was such a stupid book.

And I actually listened to the audiobook of it because I wanted to confirm.

And I was like, yeah, this is really, really bad.

Yeah, it sounds

pretty bad.

So, this thing of like, I think writing is often like doing more for the writer than it is for the reader.

And it becomes really unfortunate when we publish and heavily promote something that's doing a lot more for the writer than it is for the reader.

Because also, Jeanne Cummins had talked about like her father had died suddenly, and she wrote the book kind of in while grieving that and going through, I think, pretty extreme grief.

And the only parts of it that really feel

real to me, not that I can judge the reality of the rest of it, but you know, a lot of other people did and wrote great pieces about how wildly inaccurate it was.

But like the part about losing a relative and like grieving a husband or a father did feel real.

And I can imagine, you know, a world where you need to write that, but you have to do it like as a character who feels really distant from you in order to do it, which again, it's like, great, like do what you have to do, but then like you can't be getting your mortgage from that.

It's really easy to create harm through nonfiction because, I mean, A, we've said already, and I mean, there's not fact checking happening and then there is this complete and utter trust.

I mean, maybe it's broken down a little bit now, but I think there's a trust that if it's in a book, unless it's very clearly ridiculous, like some kind of Glenn Beck book or whatever, you know, it's like if there's something in a book, then

you can have faith that it's true.

And I know that I fall, like when when I'm doing stuff for American Hysteria, I'll always try to find like the most academic book that I can because I trust academics.

But then even so, I will try to double check their facts.

And there are, I mean, I would say, I mean, let's say one out of 20 times I check something and it's not true.

It's actually not true.

And it takes a long time to break through all of that.

But, like, you know, there is a trust that we have.

And we should obviously trust academics.

You're my fucking heroes, all of you academics out there.

But also trust them as people who are working within a flawed system and who are sometimes forced to hurry and who sometimes will just mistranslate something or rely on a mistranslation or cite something.

And rely on someone before them.

rely on an academic before them the same way I'm relying on them.

And it's like already difficult because history itself is nothing but a story that we tell.

That's something that I have learned again and again through making this show.

And I know you've learned it too.

It's like, you know, you can go back and we use sources like newspapers.com, but then we go back and say, well, the newspapers love to just make shit up constantly back then.

But then you get into like, well, I'm still telling the story that people were hearing, right?

So, it's like, I don't know, history is a weird thing, and I think memoirs exactly the same and that it's it's your personal history, and you're trying to reconstruct this thing out of like these handful of facts that you remember, and you need to make it entertaining enough for people to be compelled to read it and continue on.

But, you know, through that, a lot of scary things can actually happen.

And maybe you don't, I mean, usually you don't mean for them to happen unless you're, you know, Lawrence Passader making Michelle remembers so that he can marry this poor woman and go on a book tour yeah and then also the extent to which the people who publish these have to hoax themselves right because at a certain point there's a lot of money tied up in them and they're too big to fail

which is why I think we should have more books that pay authors less money, but more authors.

And then we don't have to have eight million dollar books that if one of them tanks, then the whole system doesn't work.

Yeah, good call.

Listen up, Spotify.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You've never been profitable.

Okay, so back to James Fry.

So very famously, in 2006, Oprah draws a line in the sand and says, James Fry, you lied to me.

And I have never been bothered by anyone lying to me before in the 20 years I've been on TV, but I'm bothered by it now.

Yes.

Yes.

And I had trouble finding the clip of this, but I did find a transcript on oprah.com.

And so I think that we should do some dramatic reading together.

Ready.

Would you like to be James Fry or would you like to be Oprah?

I'll be James.

I'll be James.

Okay.

Oprah says, James Fry is here, and I have to say it is difficult for me to talk to you because I feel really duped.

But more importantly, I feel that you betrayed millions of readers.

I think it's such a gift to have millions of people to read your work, and that bothers me greatly.

So now, as I sit here today, I don't know what is true, and I don't know what isn't.

So, first of all, I want to start with the Smoking Gun report titled The Man Who Conned Oprah.

And I want to know, were they right?

And for some background, Oprah is talking about a report by a website called The Smoking Gun, which I think most people at the time knew for being where you went to see pictures of people's mugshots.

And it did an incredibly detailed investigative report where they basically like went county by county through Ohio trying to verify this alleged arrest record that James Fry had and I'll tell you in a little bit what they found but it was not

it was different from what he said so Chelsea you know it sounds like kind of a fun road trip by the way okay yes okay

I think most of what they wrote was pretty accurate absolutely okay I think they did a good job detailing some of the discrepancies between some of the actual facts of the events

What they said was that you lied about the length of time that you spent in jail.

How long were you in jail?

Smoking Gun was right about that.

I was in jail for a few hours.

Not 87 days?

Correct.

Nice.

And let's skip ahead a little bit.

Okay, and then we're going down to after the picture, right under the picture of him with his like, bottom teeth sticking out.

Why did you lie?

Why did you have to lie about the time you spent in jail?

Why did you do that?

I think one of the coping mechanisms I developed was sort of this image of myself that was greater probably than not probably that was greater than what I actually was.

In order to get through the experience of the addiction, I thought of myself as being tougher than I was and badder than I was, and it helped me cope.

When I was writing the book, instead of being as introspective as I should have been, I clung to that image.

And did you cling to that image because that's how you wanted to see yourself?

Or did you cling to that image because that would make a better book?

Probably both.

How much of the book is fabricated?

Not very much.

I mean, all the people in the book are real.

Since the smoking gun report came out, two people who were in the facility with me have come forward.

Yes, they came forward.

I saw that New York Times report where they say many of the things that you described did happen, but maybe they didn't happen the way you said they happened, that there were encounters with counselors, but not a knockdown dragout.

So all of those encounters, were there the big fights and the chairs and you're a Mr.

Bovato tough guy, were you making that up or was that your idea of who you are?

I don't think I describe at any point a knockdown drag out fight at any point in the book.

He definitely does.

The two confrontations that occur in the book, neither of them is described as lasting longer than 10 seconds.

I mean, I think if you put 25 to 30 drug-addicted and alcoholic men in a confined space, there are going to be confrontations.

So, you're saying that your description of those confrontations were true?

Yeah.

I acted in defense of you, and as I said, my judgment was clouded because so many people seem to have gotten so much out of it.

But now I feel that you conned us all.

Do you?

I don't feel like I conned everyone.

You don't?

No.

Why?

Because I still think the book is about drug addiction and alcoholism, and nobody's disputing that I was a drug addict and an alcoholic.

It's about the battle to overcome that.

No, but I remember when you were here the last time, in the after-show, a woman stood up and said, you know, after reading this book and seeing you coming through what you came through, the way you did, and you having the attitude that you did makes me feel that I can do it too.

I think you presented a false person.

Oh my God.

Sorry.

I'm scrolling down and seeing this picture of him with obvious like tears in his eyes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

How is this scene feeling to do?

I feel like there's more to this story than meets the eye, so I'm excited to hear more.

Yeah.

Well, we're going to get into the smoking gun report in a second, but like, do you remember how this, like, that this episode was like a moment?

Like, it felt,

it feels like people were kind of

maybe not quite in awe of Oprah, but something, you know?

Yeah,

I think it's because, you know, I mean,

I feel like she did the kind of like throw your writer under the bus type of scenario.

Although I'm not saying that he did or did not deserve that or whatever, but it is also one of those things where she is acting, I think, less from a place of

genuine feeling and more from a place of like self-preservation and like trying to make sure that she doesn't look bad for the fact that she, you know, put this book out as one of her recommendations.

And of course, I don't know if that might be an unkind read, okay?

I don't think it's unkind.

I mean, I do, I agree, because I also think there's like an element, you know, because this book was made up.

Yeah.

And it's interesting to me that like the thing that he chose to lie about was basically having spent all this time in jail and being like a hardened criminal.

When in fact it turns out that the only time he spent in jail, which the smoking gun unearthed, is that

he was arrested.

for driving under the influence and spent a few hours in county lockup, but then was released to his parents because he had chicken pox.

No, stop.

And I will show you his mug shot now.

Wow, I've spent a few hours in jail.

I should write a memoir.

There you go.

Let's see.

So, yeah, just scroll down a little bit.

You'll know it when you see it.

Wow.

Okay.

He, A, is kind of hot.

So, like, I'm just going to put that out there.

I was just going to say, does this look like some UVA lacrosse player you would have hacked a sack with?

Oh, absolutely.

He would have definitely been in my class and been like talking about how wrestling is a violent ballet, which really happened boy that looked it is a violent ballet I agree it was one of the most beautiful moments I had as a as a teacher at UVA but um he

is like mad looking you know kind of looking beyond the camera he's so itchy yeah he's so itchy and he's just like fucking covered in pox man they're all over his face and uh I like that the the little description under the photo says a chicken pox laden fray.

I love that.

You know, so yeah, he ain't happy, but I guess he's going home.

So.

Yeah, because they didn't want all the other people in jail to get chickenpox.

I guess so.

You know, Sarah, I've never had chickenpox.

Oh, shit.

They tried to give it to me when I was a kid, just couldn't get it, and then I got vaccinated.

So

take that RFK.

Ah, God.

I, you know,

not to bring that up.

Sorry, everyone.

I know you're trying to disappear into a narrative that that isn't reality, but.

Yes, let's go back to the glory days of 2006 when you couldn't buy good jeans to save your life.

Sarah, you still can't buy good jeans.

I know.

I never will.

It's never going to be.

I'll have to have them made for me by Levi Strauss himself.

So here's kind of a poetic little smoking gun breakdown of James Fry's actual jail stint and how it compares to how he wrote about it.

Fry was issued two traffic tickets, one for driving under the influence and another for driving without a license and a separate misdemeanor criminal summons for having that open container of Papst.

Papst?

How many PAPS did he have to drink?

18.

Yep.

He was directed to appear in mayor's court in 10 days.

Fry was then released on a 733 cash bond, according to the report, which was written 4 a.m.

on October 25th.

So Fry's time in custody did not exceed five hours.

Wow.

To review, there was no patrolman struck with a car.

There was no urgent call for backup.

There was no rebuffed request to exit the car.

There was no, you want me out, then get me out.

There was no fucking pigs taunt.

There were no swings at cops.

There was no billy club beat down.

There was no kicking and screaming.

There was no mayhem.

There was no attempted riot inciting.

There were no 30 witnesses.

There was no 0.29 blood alcohol test.

There was no crack.

Wow.

There was no assault with a deadly weapon, assaulting an officer of the law, felony DUI, disturbing the peace, resisting arrest, driving without insurance, attempted incitement of a riot, possession of a narcotic with intent to distribute, or felony mayhem.

Well, Sarah, I think we have a poser alert.

Wee-woo-wee.

Poser alert.

Oh, last paragraph.

Okay.

And though he would later vividly write about being consumed by an internal rage that he named like a pet, Fry was somehow able to keep the fury in check on that drunken October night in Granville.

As the patrolman reported, he was polite and cooperative at all times.

Fry's arrest was as mundane as they get, as vanilla as the arrestee himself, a neatly dressed frat boy five months out of school and plastered on cheap beer.

Ooh.

Scathing.

I really love that.

I love how it's like, you've never been in jail.

No.

What?

Like, it's interesting, right?

Because, like, a lot of people have been in jail.

It's famously kind of a problem in the United States that so many of our citizens have served time in jail or prison and therefore don't have full rights as citizens because of the laws that we've written about that.

So, like, why not just publish a memoir by someone who'd been to jail?

Why was this such an appealing prospect?

Or, like, write about being a drug addict.

A lot of times, drug addicts, especially when they're white, don't go to jail.

So,

you know, I don't know.

It just feels like that detail was really an, or not even detail, that like whole thread through the book was not necessary to tell a compelling story.

Like, I don't think it's more interesting to hear about someone.

I mean, famously, it's less interesting to be in jail than it is to not be in jail.

So it's really,

yeah, it's really a weird choice.

Right?

Only someone who isn't in jail would think it must be interesting in there.

Yeah.

I mean, I'm sure it's interesting, but, you know, it's not, it just, in terms of like memoir.

It's not, you know, like the place where all the good material is hiding.

No.

No.

Because you're stopped, you know, and in prison more specifically, or, you know, jail too, because people spend a lot of time awaiting, you know, court proceedings that are jammed up.

But like, it's where, you know, your life's ability to move forward is taken away from you, basically.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So, cosplaying that is, uh, I don't know,

kind of uncool.

Yeah,

yes, to put it mildly, definitely uncool.

This gets into one of the books I was looking at about this topic, which is Imposters, Literary Hoaxes, and Cultural Authenticity by Christopher L.

Miller, which looks at American hoaxes and also some French hoaxes.

Ooh, love it.

Let me read you

a quote here.

So, Miller writes, a hoax is a metafiction, a fiction about a fiction.

It is designed not merely to tell a story, but to weave a lie around that story.

A lie about the status of the story, its origins, its authenticity, and mostly its authorship.

It is the lie that constitutes the hoax.

A story of someone else's culture, honestly told by an author identified as him or herself, is not a hoax.

To be truly a hoax, a literary ruse must fool its readers, and in the best cases fool every one of them, at least for a time.

A hoax that fools no one is merely a game.

A hoax that tricks everyone is potentially very scandalous and very instructive.

When successful, an intercultural hoax reveals preconceived notions about culture and disrupts the concepts of authenticity and genuineness that readers so often seek in representations of, quote, minority cultures.

Each of the case studies in this book reflects a deliberate attempt to deceive, to lie about the authorship of a text.

These authors want their text and the persona of the author to pass as something they are not.

This often involves a tremendous amount of planning and subterfuge, sometimes even danger and legal jeopardy.

Why do they bother?

Intercultural literary hoaxes are almost always premised on inequality, and most of them in their creative pretense cross a boundary from a realm of greater privilege to one of lesser privilege.

Why does hoaxing almost always follow that trajectory rather than its opposite?

Minority literatures and and cultures, broadly defined, occupy a special place in the world of hoaxes.

They are particularly susceptible to impostures.

Cultures deemed less able to represent themselves are often the target of hoaxes perpetrated by writers who come from the literate majority or Western side.

The essence of the minority is tapped and extracted, synthesized, and faked.

The majority's perception is that minority and foreign cultures need to be explained to the reading book buying majority, and this dynamic has far-reaching cultural and economic ripple effects.

The inquiring majority mind wants to know about the minority, which is construed as different, distant, peculiar, inscrutable, mysterious, and perhaps in need of help.

This is true whether the minority is an American youth subculture right next door, as in Go Ask Alice, a nun cloistered against her will, as in La as in La Religieuse, urban ethnic minorities in the United States, as in Famous All Over Town and Love and Consequences, or in France, as in Lilla Dessa and Vive Metou.

I don't know.

Or distant rural Africans, as in La Fondoir.

Tell me what you think about that.

What I'm hearing is like, you know, you're not generally going to see someone from a lesser degree of privilege writing a hoax memoir about like being some sordid rich person in

a mansion in Manhattan, right?

It's like it's more

that people are cosplaying as someone with a minority status and kind of being a tourist into that world because the book buying public is going to be

interested in what is novel to them.

And that is probably going to not be

necessarily a tale of some middle-class white woman taking her kids to school.

It's going to be

a tale of woe and a tale of

distinctness that they can't really,

really

experience themselves.

I don't know.

And so it's like, and yet people are like wanting that story to be told to them from a peer almost, even if it's subconscious, right?

Like it's like,

it's like they don't want to actually listen to the voices of experience because almost like that's too uncomfortable.

It's like it needs to be passed through this filter of sameness that then they can process the information.

And I think this happens on a subconscious level, right?

Like, I think one of the best things about people is that we are pretty curious, you know, and like we want to know about each other and we want to know things.

And I think often the desires that we have as people

are

better than what media wants to provide us with.

Because if you're playing a game of of not what is the most interesting, but what is the most likely to earn me the profit that I need to, you know, offer shareholders ultimately, because, you know, publishing is an industry, then you end up privileging something that's maybe like only half interesting, you know, because it's like it has to be similar enough to what succeeded before in order to be the kind of thing that you can sell to the people above you who have to approve it basically or to make it seem like a sheer thing.

And so we end up actually with, I mean, I would argue that A Million Little Pieces and a couple of the other books I'm going to tell you about today kind of

demonstrate a trend where actual curiosity is sort of funneled into books that are destined to not really answer any of the questions that people bring to them because they're also

being imagined by people who weren't there.

Right.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

I love that quote.

Love that this book sounds great.

So shout out.

Right?

Right?

Yeah.

Well, and so another of the books that Miller references in that list is called Love and Consequences.

And I happen to have it here.

I'm not sure.

And I wonder if you remember this one.

Okay.

So, this was

a

scandal that happened a couple years after the A Million Little Pieces scandal, so in 2008, and it was kind of overshadowed by it, I think.

And basically, a woman published a memoir about

being

white, but also

part indigenous and being raised by a black family in foster care in Los Angeles and being a gang member and selling drugs and spending her first real money on a burial plot for herself.

And

wouldn't you know?

She turned out to be just an Episcopalian girl from Sherman Oaks.

Oh my God.

That is like so iconic though to be like,

the first thing I bought with my money, not a CD from Fred Meyer.

No, my own funeral plot.

Oh, okay.

Here she is.

That's her.

This is her, like, I need to look like I was in a gang headshot, but I'm definitely a girl named Margaret from Sherman Oaks.

And I'm like perpetually like 15 is what that face says to me.

Yep.

Okay.

All right.

Fuck.

So this came out, and the half-life of this was a lot quicker because it was out for about a week.

It generated interest.

There was a New York Times piece about her.

She was living in Eugene.

Oregon mentioned.

Eugene.

Shout out, all you

fucking hippies.

I love you.

And a relative of hers,

similar to the Rachel Dolejall story, not too long after, another white woman of the Pacific Northwest who could not get it together.

Wait, who's that?

Just kidding.

No, I'm just kidding.

I know Rach.

Of course you do.

Making Washington look bad for 10 or 15 years now.

But for people who don't know,

do you want to shog our memory?

Well, the long and short of it, I guess, is that Rachel Jolzell

was a white woman who pretended to be a black woman to the point where she was part of the maybe state or city chapter of the NAACP.

And then it came out later that she was facing.

And yeah, I mean, there's a documentary about it.

I don't really, I mean, God, it's like culture is just boom, boom, boom, boom.

Who's Rachel Dolzell?

I don't even know if I remember anymore.

Well, there's just a lot of hoaxers to keep up with.

It's kind of one of the only growth industries left in this country, you know?

Not to blame the economy on all of it.

Yeah, yeah.

And like, God bless you if you're a hoaxer out there doing innocent hoaxes.

I feel like they don't really exist anymore, but give me a Blair Witch, please.

And so the Love and Consequences scandal, it feels similar to the Rachel Dolezal scandal, too, because it's like a white woman who, and when this breaks and after her, you know, a relative of hers contacts the press and is like, hey,

none of this happened and the book you just published is not true.

Her response is like, well, I was hanging out at Starbucks and I was talking to teenagers who were gang members when I was writing this book and I just wanted to tell their stories through my book and say

that they'd happened to me and that way people would care more about the teens.

And it's like,

I don't even think you think that.

She doesn't fucking think that.

That fucking caramel Frappuccino ass 15 year old.

No, I mean, it's, I think that that's a really like,

easy way to try to get out of what you've done is to like be like, I was shining a light.

Yeah.

And it's also the most kind of like AmeriCorps volunteer kind of justification and like, you know, to be like, yes, I published a book that I seem to have made a good amount of money from.

And it was all lies and all cultural appropriation, but, but it was for the greater good.

What's probably true is just that like there's a basic human need for attention.

And sometimes if you find something that gets it for you, you just don't want to make yourself stop, especially when there's money involved.

But then, what that amounts to is like creating a fiction that allows you, like, I mean, the way white women fail upwards is incredible.

You know, like the number of kind of like non-profit leadership roles and

like the amount of power that you might end up with in terms of like state or city or national policy or like the amount of influence that you might end up having on legislation or just the way people see reality because of fraud like

is stunning.

Like it's almost like if you're the kind of person who is sort of,

I don't know, young and dumb or grown up and dumb or sort of self-centered enough to perpetuate a hoax simply because you're getting something out of it or because it's kind of fun, you know, which I and I think most people are coming at it for with sort of more psychological baggage than that.

But even if you are, then like the problem comes from the fact that we're all so deeply connected and we seem to be getting more connected all the time.

Yeah.

If the impulse is

that you want to like help a group of people, I think there are like

ways to like help them materially like not write a book where you are thinking like now people will understand this minority group like, because I'm writing this fictionalized

what I invented.

That's a pretty see-through tactic to get out of

what you've done.

And also, it's stunning to me that people looked at this woman that you've showed me a photo of and said, yes, hardened gang member, 100%.

What gang was she in?

Was she like, was it one of the big, one of the big two?

One of the big two.

Do we know?

Yes.

Well, let's, I'll read the flap to you, okay?

In an unforgettable voice that weaves $24.95, by the way.

In an unforgettable voice, that weaves stunning forthright narration together with the distinctive rhythmic slang of the street.

Oh, fuck.

Margaret B.

Jones brings us movingly into the world of her youth, a world of gangs and poverty, but also hope and survival, to create a memoir like no other.

At age five, Margaret B.

Jones was removed from her suburban California home and put into foster care.

At age age eight, after many relocations, she landed in a foster home in south central Los Angeles, the region of gang-ridden neighborhoods made infamous by the Rodney King riots.

Thank you so much for that.

A part white, part Native American girl, Jones grew up in the predominantly black community in an all-black household run by the formidable big mom.

Oh, my God.

A stern, single, overworked woman

raising four grandchildren for their absent mother.

Wow, this could not have been constructed by a white person.

No, no.

Using only cliches.

It feels so authentic.

This is a good time to point out that publishing, like so many other industries within media broadly in the United States, is extremely white.

And if you are a white person who's making stuff up because you saw a John Singleton movie one time on cable, then like your editor probably won't notice because she probably also went to Barnard.

Yeah, yeah, very true, very true.

And was it successful before, like, like

the plug got pulled on it before, like, they stopped promoting it within a week, basically.

Okay, okay.

Okay.

Which is, you know, nice.

That is good, good job, everyone, I guess.

Better job.

We'll say better job, everyone.

Yeah.

Better job.

And then let's look at another book from the immediately post-James Fry years, which also,

like, within about a week or two of Love and Consequences also was unveiled as a fraud, but I think this should have been a bigger story.

And this is, of course, Misha, a memoir of the Holocaust years,

which is about, you know, this one?

Vaguely, but I know that this has happened before.

Fake Holocaust memoirs, yes.

Yeah.

And so this is a book by a woman who did, interestingly, did not attempt to to write a book.

Like the way that this starts off, it's a little bit Michelle-coded because she was just this older woman who was a Belgian immigrant in, I think, the Boston area who belonged to a local synagogue and who it was kind of known in the community because she gave talks locally, had survived the Holocaust as a child by being raised by a pack of wolves.

So we've got a lot going on in there.

Yeah.

There's a great article about this story and how it was unveiled as fiction by Blake Eskin that was in Boston magazine in 2008.

It's called The Girl Who Cried Wolf.

Great title.

Tragedy opens up more room for lying, unfortunately, because it's nobody wants to call, nobody wants to say that somebody isn't telling the truth about how they survived something truly terrible, which is also how separately, you know, we had there's a great documentary called The Woman Who Wasn't There about a woman who faked surviving September 11th.

Oh, it's a great documentary and wild story.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And just, and so you have inevitably people who want to align themselves with the tragedy in order to get kind of an outpouring of emotional support, I think, which is, it seems like what was going on there, or to sort of exist in a special category of identity that they get to have as a survivor, like not even of the regular traumas that a lot of people go through, but of something that instantly is a shorthand that will tell people to treat them with care or to give them more attention or something like that.

Aaron Trevor Bowie, the fact that something like our empathy and desire to believe can be exploited does say that we have empathy and a desire to believe.

So it is true.

It is, on one hand, like nice that it happens, but obviously, on the other hand, it's like incredibly disturbing and upsetting that not only that someone can come in and become a charlatan of this tragedy, but that we don't have the space to question that because of the implication of what would happen to those who are telling the truth when we start to question.

So it is just like this very dark piece of the Venn diagram where, if that makes any sense, but yeah, it is just a huge bummer because it speaks to both like positive and negative parts of

being a person who wants to believe.

the stories that were told by people and we want to believe that people are honest and we want to believe that someone wouldn't do something like that.

And it is, I think, kind of baffling for us to understand that someone might do that.

But then on the other hand, you and I have talked a lot about

the desire to make larger your pain, like through kind of the metaphor of something like Michelle remembers, like Michelle is in pain and she wanted or, you know, I mean, there were forces that were manipulating her as well.

But like when we're in pain, if it's the regular quote unquote type of pain, it doesn't feel like that's expressing what it feels like to be in pain.

So we want to like blow it up through metaphor.

You know, we want, we want to be like, okay, I'm lonely or like, I feel like I was hurt by my parents.

So I'm going to like, you know, blow that up to like, my parents hurt me because they were Satanists who were like sacrificing a horse in my room or, you know, but it does come from like a sad place still.

Like the hoaxer is looking for something through the hoax.

And I think it's more than money a lot of the time.

But, you know,

it's complicated.

It's just, there's

very complicated stuff.

And ultimately, the, you know, the ends do not justify the means by any stretch of the imagination.

But, you know, it doesn't mean that people aren't trying to work something out.

And the extent to which people can hoax themselves throughout their lives, you know, is really something.

And I do think that often the best con artists do not have a plan and are able to lie with no tension because they basically believe what they're saying, you know?

Because, like, you know, Trump basically lies all the time, but he also has such a fragile ego that, like, he's allergic to the truth.

Yeah.

Well, so the story of how Misha got unmasked is interesting, too.

It took like 10 years.

Like, this one was out for a while, and part of it is because it was published by a small press, Mount Ivy Press, which the Blake Eskin article makes a point of mentioning had previously published titles including Weddings for Complicated Families, Families, Maine Dish Salads, and Gigolos, The Secret Lives of Men Who Service Women.

I do.

Do you remember Deuce Bigolo, Male Gigolo?

Yes, I do.

Yeah, I watch that movie a lot.

That's all I ever think about when someone says Gigolo.

I know, me too.

So Misha comes out in 1997, and it comes out partly because the publisher of Mountain Ivy Press, the woman who brought us Maine Dish Salads, Jane Daniel, really pursues Misha to try and get her to make it into a book and hires a ghost writer and then finishes the ghostwriting herself and

I mean shapes the content of the book in ways that most readers don't imagine publishers do but which they do sometimes.

Hears from people as it's going to print who express doubt about it like she brings it to an academic who's an expert on

child Holocaust survival stories and who's like, I mean, it's not that details are wrong.

It's that the whole thing appears to be a fantasy.

But it still is published.

And

again, like it might not have been unveiled as a fake memoir if the publisher hadn't withheld money from Misha and her ghostwriter.

Oh, okay.

And so the year after it's published, the ghostwriter files.

a suit alleging breach of contract and

the rights for the book end up frozen basically until the court, until the lawsuit proceeds to its conclusion.

And so then there's drama because Misha and her husband, who are elderly and kind of, you know, living in the Boston area, are telling people that they don't have any money and they need a place to stay.

And so they move in with this random woman

for a couple years.

And it turns out that they apparently do have money in the bank, but they

are

saving it for something

and

saying that they need all these profits from the Misha memoir, but they can't get them yet.

And Misha does eventually win her suit, but this is ruinous for Jane Daniel, the publisher, because the court tells Jane to award Misha like several million dollars, like more money than she has from her main dish salads money.

Then she starts to think, hey, what about this people who said this memoir was fake, this memoir that's now ruining my life?

Maybe it it is.

Yep.

The details of this are like, it's horrible, but the details are kind of a delight because she starts a blog, Jane does, called Bestseller Exclamation Point, where she says she's writing a bestseller in real time on this blog.

Oh, wow.

And it's a bestseller about proving that Misha was a fraud.

And incredibly, because she is writing this seemingly, you know, like the kind of blog that you would stumble across in the mid-2000s and be like, oh, the internet sure is weird, and then move on.

A genealogist happens to come across it and is like, this is interesting.

Yeah, I could do some genealogy on this one.

So the genealogist, whose name is Sharon Sargent, she lives in Waltham.

She contacts other genealogists and is able to find documentation showing that Misha was in fact four

in 1941 when she was allegedly adopted by wolves and also walked from Belgium to Ukraine.

And I feel like the logic is that seven is maybe an age when you could walk across Europe, but four is certainly too young.

Yeah.

And this investigation does uncover documents showing that Misha was enrolled in an elementary school in the fall of 1943, again, when she was supposed to be walking across Europe with the wolves.

And the wolves just walked with her, huh?

That's the thing.

We don't know what wolves do.

Then we would be able to spot Hoax's memoirs better.

Yeah, they're pretty great.

I mean, they mind their own business.

That's what's pretty great about them.

It's a myth.

But I don't know if they raise humans either.

So, I mean.

And so there's pressure coming from another side because the book was also optioned to be made into a movie, a French-language movie, at about the same time.

So that upped its profile in Europe, which led to more people asking questions about it.

Yeah.

And then there's a final bombshell unearthed by a journalist named Mark Metapeningen, which I'm sure I didn't say right, who writes for a newspaper called Le Soire in Belgium,

who uncovers that Misha aka Monique's parents were members of the Belgian resistance, and they did orphan her, and that apparently her mother

you know, they were captured by Nazis.

Her mother never gave anybody up, but that her father did.

Her father named names and died a traitor, basically.

Wow.

And so, when she's confronted with this, she says, Yes, my name is Monique Duval, but I've wanted to forget that since I was four years old.

She says, The story of Misha, quote, is not actual reality, but it was my reality, my way of surviving.

I ask forgiveness for all those who feel betrayed, but I beg them to put themselves in the face of a four-year-old girl who had lost everything, who had to survive, who fell into an abyss of solitude, and to understand that I never wanted anything other than to ease my suffering.

Which

I believe that, but also don't publish it and don't make it into a movie and put it in theaters.

That's a very compelling story.

What you like, the truth that you just said was very like, that sounds like a memoir all its own.

There's no reason to involve the wolves.

We don't have to bring the wolves into this.

I just think it's so wild when I hear about these people who create these hoax memoirs is like

do you have no anxiety like I

would just be like the anxiety anxiety is firing on the wrong circus anxiety that I feel making American hysteria that I might get just the tiniest fact incorrect I the anxiety that I feel just making a show in which I'm trying to approximate some historical truth versus just

inventing a Holocaust story or like some atrocity propaganda is just so, it's just beyond any comprehension that I have outside of morality, just in terms of like just getting caught.

Yeah.

I don't know.

The stories we tell about ourselves get so ingrained in who we believe we are and that I don't think that the truth is inaccessible, but I think that, yeah, the human capacity to lie to ourselves is like underrated in terms of how strong it can be.

But this idea that like you have this wound that needs to be be addressed and you're presented with a way to have people understand by shorthand that you've experienced trauma and you need help for it.

And like, I don't really blame Michelle in the same way that I blame the Holocaust memoirists because she, but then also she did

not on purpose, but she did really help destroy our legal systems.

You know, like she didn't lie about being part of a genocide, but she did invent one to have been involved in and then created the illusion that something had been there that wasn't, you know, so it's just, I don't know, but I do feel like if we cared more about individual trauma, there wouldn't be such a need to write these stupid fake memoirs.

Because our culture has become so trauma-focused,

there is an incentive to present your trauma in a public forum.

And there is probably even a a greater incentive to expand that trauma into a narrative that is consumable.

And I think, again, what is at the root of all of this is like the capitalistic need to package your trauma into something that people want to consume.

And so it needs to be big.

It's just like the newspapers, you know, it's just like

we need to sensationalize this story in a way that it becomes so overblown that people are desperate to know more, right?

And I think that that, you know, and this isn't an excuse to any of those people, but I just think that it's the reality of American culture and that we're always going to pay attention to things that are the biggest and the loudest and the most frightening and the strangest.

And why we love firecrackers.

Yeah, I mean, we love it.

That is, I think that's a huge who humans are, but I think it's very much who Americans are.

And,

you know, the allure of a good story can have like really dire consequences, right?

Because we're just, I'm, you and I are the same way.

Like, we're hungry for stories.

Luckily, we have something in us that blocks us from creating false ones.

I hope.

We'll see.

There's lots of time left in our lives.

So far, fingers crossed.

Covering some trinkets.

Yeah, it's a great cover.

But, you know, I just think it's, it is,

we are incentivized, whether it be by social media attention or monetization of another variety, to

exaggerate our lives.

And we don't need to exaggerate our lives.

Like, everybody's trauma is valid, even if we take the word trauma away, which has become its own like.

nightmare of a term.

I know.

It's like,

it's just like,

you just, you hurt.

You have pain.

You're experiencing pain.

The reality that we're working our way towards, I hope, culturally, is this idea that like

you can experience trauma just from something that seems very small to anyone who's looking at it from the outside.

And it doesn't have to be a good story and it doesn't have to be a bestseller.

And it's still enough to affect you very deeply.

And the fact that you don't have a bestseller type story doesn't mean that you don't have a right to need help, basically.

Yeah.

And I mean, it almost brings me back to thinking about our conversation about poetry in that like poetry does allow you to express pain in a way that doesn't have to have a narrative behind it.

And you get to have impressions, right, of pain.

You get to have like,

I don't know, it's, it's just in order to be good, poetry doesn't need a tidy narrative.

And I think that's why it gets to a truth that other forms of writing can't, even if it's a truth that you can't understand intellectually.

Right.

It's a felt truth.

And I do feel like the fake memoir is in a way like understanding that something

can feel true and can even feel truer than what you've been through.

And again, it's like, yeah,

keep that in your journal.

Don't publish it.

Keep it in your journal, babe.

Yeah, don't publish it.

At least publish it under fiction, but like, no, people are probably going to be mad if it's a story that you didn't live and are trying to tell instead of like helping someone else tell a story who actually lived through it.

But I'd still rather you do it as fiction.

Or poetry.

Or, you know, or a zine.

A zen, yeah.

And again, it's like, it's never about making excuses for people that do fucked up shit, but it is like always more important, I think, to take the individual out of it and say, what in our culture promotes this type of hoax?

Like, why are we so ready to make this hoax happen?

Because a hoax doesn't happen in a vacuum, that's for sure.

It needs conditions and it needs a structure for it to grow.

Like it needs a house.

You know, if it's like a vine, it needs a house to grow on.

That's poetry.

Yeah, that's poetry, baby.

That's poetry, baby.

The Himalayan Blackberry on the abandoned gas station of life.

That's it.

That is what a hoax memoir is.

Yeah.

Well, and it also occurs to me that, like, Americans are obsessed with stories of people who are lucky and who survived the impossible.

And our demand for that means that our taste is for stories of the impossible.

This American way of life, where if you don't do it yourself, if you don't like somehow overcome all of the systems that exist through your sheer magnificent willpower alone, then you're not worthy of our empathy, really.

Well, let's, I want to close with just one last little book, and this is different from our others.

This is a book that was kind of a sensation about a hundred years ago and has since been forgotten.

Well, really, an author who has since been forgotten whose name is Opal Whiteley.

Have you ever heard of her?

No, but I think that's a lovely name.

Here is a New Yorker article about Opal by Michelle Dean, whose writing writing I have always loved.

Michelle writes, Her life had the flavor of the apocryphal from the start.

From the time when Opal arrived at the University of Oregon's campus in Eugene in 1916, I wasn't planning for this to be Eugene-themed, but it is.

Another Eugene.

She was 18, but she stood under five feet with olive skin and long dark braids.

Despite her penchant for unfashionable clothing and odd behavior, she was something of a celebrity in Oregon, where she'd grown up in a small town called Cottage Grove.

From the age of 12, she'd been traveling all over the state, giving well-attended lectures about the natural world, a subject on which she was largely self-taught.

The press called her a genius.

She called herself the Sunshine Fairy.

Her popularity stemmed from her avoidance of the dryness of science.

She was more of a charismatic mystic.

The wife of the president of the university told people that she had once come upon Opal crouched on the ground, singing what seemed to be hymns to some earthworms.

So Opal, when she's 22 and 1919, she goes to the offices of the Atlantic Monthly in Boston.

So Opal comes to the Atlantic Monthly.

She's written a book called The Fairyland Around Us that she wants to publish.

They're like,

maybe not.

But the editor-in-chief, whose name is Ellery Sedgwick, says that there was something very young and eager and fluttering about this woman, like a bird in a thicket.

He asks if she has a diary to publish, and she's like, for sure, I kept one when I was a six-year-old, but my foster sibling tore it up, and so I would need some time to reconstruct it.

And so he puts her in his mother's house to spend nine months reconstructing her childhood diary, and it's published, and it becomes a sensation.

And, you know, one of the questions is, was she reconstructing it or was she just writing it?

And also, how much does it matter since she's not claiming to have survived the Holocaust?

Yeah, I mean, whatever.

Go for it.

I don't care about that.

Yeah, it's like my diary from when I was, I have the earliest diary I have is from when I was like

maybe eight.

And all it is is like me creating acronyms about boys that I thought I was in love with, which is just like, you know, like I L J, like I love Jake.

And then I would just write the acronym.

So, you know, I mean,

a really

riveting read.

Yeah.

very subtle as well.

What's interesting is that it's like, it's really, it's very palimpsestic, right?

Because she's saying that she wrote this diary as a six-year-old.

She reconstructed it as a young adult.

And then it's published, you know, by an editor who kind of works on it, a little bit like Emily Dickinson's poetry, where there's sort of line breaks and creative spacing that is sort of added to it to bring out, you know, the meaning other people see in it, basically.

All right.

And I'm putting a link here.

And I would love for you to just read the beginning of this book until we get to like the first

break.

It's a couple pages.

My mother and father are gone.

The man did say they went to heaven and do live with God, but it is lonesome without them.

The mama where I live says I am a new sance.

Is that right?

One of the things people find charming about the book is that it's like a child trying to sound out adult words theoretically.

theoretically, so this is supposed to be her writing nuisance.

Got it.

The mama, where I live, says I am a nuisance.

I think it is something grown-ups don't like to have around.

She sends me out to bring wood in.

Some days there is cream to be shaked into butter.

Some days I sweep the floor.

The mama has likes to have her house nice and clean.

Under the steps lives a toad.

I call him Virgil.

He and I, we are friends.

Under the house live some mice.

They have such beautiful eyes.

Back of the house are some nice wood rats.

The most lovely of them all is Thomas Chatterton, Jupiter, Zeus.

He has been waiting in my sunbonnet, long waits while I make prints.

He wants to go explores.

The dog, brave Horatius, has longing in his eyes.

He wants to go.

In the pig pen, I hear Peter Paul Rubens squealing.

We will all go explores.

What do you think?

Did a six-year-old write this?

No.

I don't think so either.

And weirdly, what clinches it for me personally is the use of the word shanty.

Yeah.

Yeah, totally.

Well, it's also just like, don't we already know that a six-year-old didn't write it?

Because she was like, said she, like when it was marketed, do we know if.

well it was marketed as yeah as her journey her the diary of a six-year-old yeah and people had doubts you know immediately you know because people were not yeah any dumber then than they are now

yeah yes right but yeah what are your impressions of this and especially as a trained poet My impressions is that a lady wanted to write like a six-year-old, you know, it just really reads that way.

And

I don't know, you can do something like that, and I'm not like going to be mad.

It's like silly to pretend to be six, I guess, but it is really different than taking on a story that's not yours that could have like material harm come from it to other people.

And this, again, I know this happened a long time ago, but now you could put something like that out and just admit what you were doing.

And you're still, you could just be like, I'm writing as my six-year-old self.

And it's like, that's cool.

Like, I'm more interested in that than reading a six-year-old's diary.

Probably all of the books we've talked about today, like, this also feels like a therapy journal, you know?

Like, so many of the books you read, you're like, I think this should be a therapy journal, whether they're hoaxes or not.

Having talked about all of these with you today, in each of these, there's this idea of like the author using literary work to construct an other self that they believe to be more lovable than the one that they are.

You know, and that like, these are interesting poems for a young poet to be writing in the voice of their childhood self.

Like, they're pretty good as poems.

Like, I like them.

I would, like you said, I would read them if they were just being described as the thing that they seem to be.

You know, and I do believe that there's likely like, you know, there perfectly well could be an actual diary that there's, that this has some basis in, right?

But it's like, I, there's not a doubt in my own mind that this was not dramatically improved on by an adult, you know, at the very least.

I'll say, yeah.

That's revealing, you know, the fact that we were more interested then in a girl prodigy than in a woman poet.

And we're more interested in sort of this idea of someone proving they deserve our attention through being spectacular than by expressing to us how difficult it is to be ordinary.

Because as ordinary people, that's actually kind of the thing that we need to hear the most, but is also very scary to us.

Dude, yeah, yeah, being ordinary, the great American sin.

Right.

None of us are supposed supposed to be ordinary.

And yet statistically, I mean,

I feel like it is this just overblown version of what we all do.

Like, you know, like Chelsea Weber Smith proper on American hysteria is not exactly.

who I am.

I'm not a 12-sided die of you.

I'm much bitchier.

Yeah.

I'm much bitchier than I am on American Hysteria.

And, you know, I might have my like sweet little like ending scenarios where I like get on my, you know, my like little soapbox.

I try not to get on a bigger box.

I get on my little soapbox and I say all my little things and I say my conclusions and shit.

But it's not like it didn't take like a much bitchier time to get to those like nice loving conclusions.

Like, you know, you're just constructing a self.

Well, it's like you're the vineyard and the show is the wine, you know, and when you drink the wine, you're like, wow, it must be great to be wine.

And it's like, artists are not wine.

We like sort of crush our being into something that becomes wine, but like the day-to-day existence is not that drinkable.

Yeah, absolutely.

And I mean, I think that that is part of art.

Like, I think there's this like misconception that

the artist puts forth their truest self.

And it's like, that couldn't be farther from the truth, you know, and it's that's okay because like art is about more than just stream of consciousness, sometimes, not always, but like there is like a certain polishing and there's a certain you know manipulation that happens because you want to get the product.

I hate saying the word product, but you want the, you know, you want the, the end creation to reflect what you would like to be almost.

Like, I feel like, and that's really problematic when it's like, I would like to be this, this fake person I've created in my hoax memoir.

But there is some true thing to that where it's like, you wouldn't be writing toward this like false identity if there wasn't part of you that like wanted to have that false identity because somehow your own identity.

And that the best way to sell that identity to yourself is to sell it to everybody else, maybe.

Ooh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And like, I think I want to be a more loving, empathetic, and non-judgmental person than I am.

So like, I'm I'm going to become that in what I put out because that's like what, not just like, oh, I want to be this way for my image, but like that's what I want to put out in the world.

Like I want, you know, I may not be that.

That's how people feel about parenting, I think.

It's just that we are, we have podcast audiences instead of children.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very true.

Very true.

I don't know.

It's, it's like, we all put out what we would like to be and it's strange what some people would like to be, I guess.

Yeah.

We put out what we would like to be and we secretly reveal what we are the whole time.

You don't have to remember everything, like, because if you're actually writing a memoir about your actual self and you're actually trying really, really hard to access the truth and recognizing that the truth is like delicate and fragile, you know, and like needs to be

pursued very carefully.

I think there's a lot of therapeutic work and like like you get to learn who you are by writing about who you are and maybe writing through who you think you are or who you would like to be or the lies that you would like to tell and then not telling them and then

realizing what the things you remember say about who you are and what you've been through.

You know, I think that it's a if you're writing in order to lie to yourself, then you will lie to your audience.

And if you're writing in order to tell the truth to yourself, then

you'll also tell the truth to your audience in more ways than you realize as you're doing it.

And it's scary, but it feels really good.

Yeah.

Kelsey, just, I don't know, thank you for being here and thank you for pursuing the truth and like doing the very stressful, clammy work of trying to figure out what happened as opposed to just freewheeling it, you know?

Because thank you for doing that.

Oh, it is clammy.

Well, thank you, Sarah.

Oh,

thank you so much for having me.

Thank you for being in the unified field with me.

And

I guess, I don't know, this makes me want to tell just a little Kelsey story because you visited me a couple weeks ago, and we were driving back to my house, and you saw what looked like an interestingly abandoned building.

And then you were like, I'm gonna get into that building, and then I woke up the next day, and you were gone, and I was like, Yep,

they'll be back.

And I didn't get into the building, but I got really close to it.

And sometimes, that's as close as you can get to the truth.

And that's our episode.

Thank you so much for being with us.

Thank you to Kelsey Weber Smith, host of American Hysteria, for joining and

talking about chicken pox and poetry and abandoned buildings and everything else with me.

And thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick for editing and producing.