Selling Your Soul for a Good Story

The publishing industry has been rife with scandal in recent years. We’ve all been told how competitive the market is, but lately it seems like some writers will quite literally do anything — lie, cheat, or steal — in order to see their books in print.

By CC Staff

Did I Type Life? I Meant Lie.

The phenomenon started with James Frey and his supposed memoir A Million Little Pieces. After getting all kinds of recognition, including the nod from Oprah, Frey’s book was discovered to be filled with lies.

But why would someone decide to write a bunch of lies? After a little more sleuthing, it came to light that Frey had originally pitched his book as fiction, but that it wouldn’t sell. In order to make the story more compelling — to editors as well as readers — Frey then repackaged it as nonfiction.

Fast forward to 2008, and here we are again — except this time, one fake memoir has become two. In late February, Misha Defonseca admitted that she lied about being Jewish, being a Holocaust survivor, and being raised by wolves. One week later, Margaret B. Jones, a.k.a. Margaret Seltzer, was outed by her sister when she tried to pass a fiction of foster care and gang activity off as her real childhood.

Jones’s book never made it to the stands, but Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years is another story. The book has circled the world in 18 different languages, and the author was once awarded $22.5 in damages when she took her publisher to court for breach of contract (!). To add insult to injury, the French have made a film about Misha’s remarkable LIFE, only to find out the F was in there by accident.

Why would these women make up such heart-wrenching tales, and then falsely market them as personal experience? “Misha of the Wolves” justifies the international falsehood by saying she believes her story in her heart, a roundabout way of admitting that it really didn’t happen. Jones, on the other hand, takes a different approach: She claims to have sold her book for completely selfless reasons, in order to give a voice to the people whose stories she stole.

Stranger Than Fiction

Some writers will stop at nothing to sell a story, even if it means claiming fiction as fact. So what do the real fiction writers do?

They steal, of course.

I don’t know about you, but my teachers have been drilling the anti-plagiarism mantra into my head since middle school. So I really don’t get how anyone can claim that they didn’t know copying another writer’s work is illegal, not to mention immoral.

But apparently neither Kaavya Viswanathan nor Cassie Edwards got the message. Viswanathan was a teenaged chick lit author who was caught taking entire passages from other writers’ books, paraphrasing them, and dropping them right into her own. She later claimed that it was an accident, a result of a nearly photographic memory. But as a Harvard student, you really have to wonder how she could overlook something like plagiarism.

But the Cassie Edwards scandal is an even bigger mystery. Edwards has been writing historial romance (read: smut books with a historical flavor) for more than 25 years, and is rather well known for her Indian romances (read: fantasy erotica). Early this year, a popular book review blog discovered stolen passages in Edwards’s most recent book, Shadow Bear — and then went on to find rampant plagiarism in several others. When the story broke, Edwards claimed she didn’t know that what she was doing was wrong, which begs the question: How many other works has Edwards plagiarized since 1982?

Anything to Succeed

With scandals like these rocking the literary world every few weeks or month, it’s even more appalling to remember that these are only the ones we’ve caught. How many other authors have published under false pretenses?

Anyone who aspires to write has been told how competitive the market is. If you’re lucky, a publisher will pick up your book after only a few years of shopping it around. With stakes such as these, is it any wonder some writers will go to any lengths to increase their odds of success?

Unfortunately, these scandals only muddy the waters for the rest of us. Now the publishing industry is talking about being more careful to fact-check memoirs before accepting them for publication — imagine what that will do to writers who have perfectly true, but difficult-to-prove, stories to tell. And Viswanathan and Edwards certainly haven’t helped the chick lit and romance genres much: Many people view these types of books as “trash,” and the plagiarism scandals only adds to that perception.

The Price of Success

When James Frey decided to pitch his book as nonfiction, when Margaret B. Jones first started to write down the stories she heard from people on the streets, and when Cassie Edwards copied entire passages of her “research” into her books, you can bet that they never thought they’d eventually be where they are now. Frey just wanted to increase his chances of making a sale, Jones wanted to raise awareness, and Edwards wanted to make her books as accurate historically as they were…um…anatomically.

These authors all found success by lying, cheating, and stealing. Unfortunately, they all had forgotten about what happens when you become successful: The more people read your books, the more likely someone is to find something amiss. For Frey, it happened pretty quickly; Jones never even got off the ground. For Edwards, on the other hand, it took 26 years.

It just goes to show that if you sell your soul for success, sooner or later you’ll be called upon to pay up.