In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Don't Feed the Liars!On Fraudulent Memoirs, and Why They're Bad
• Joshua Landy

For me, this all began with a conversation about James Frey. You know James Frey: he's the chap who went on Oprah with a memoir about his life as an alcoholic, then ended up having to go back on Oprah to get ripped into, well, a million little pieces for having made a bunch of it up. In thinking his book a calamitous thing to happen to the world of letters, I didn't imagine I was being particularly original or controversial. But then I happened to use it as an offhand example of something in conversation, and all of a sudden I found myself meeting with resistance. "What's wrong with A Million Little Pieces?" I was asked. "So what if it's made up? All memoirs are made up! If readers get something out of it, what's the problem?"¹

Since then I've been curious about what exactly the problem is. Because surely there is one. What I want to do here is to make some suggestions about what it could be, why people like my interlocutor don't seem to acknowledge it, and how the world would be a better place if they did. We'll see that it isn't, in reality, obligatory to make everything up; that memory isn't completely unreliable; that we're not entirely at its mercy anyway; and that while interpretation and sequencing may change the significance of events, they don't change the events themselves. We'll see that there are practical, ethical, and aesthetic advantages to [End Page 137] not being, and not rewarding, barefaced liars. We'll see that the world needs memoirs, just as it needs works of fiction. We'll see that fictions can do things memoirs can't do, but that memoirs can also do things fictions—even autobiographical fictions—can't do. And we'll see that the memoir genre could not survive if we took it to be, like fiction, a matter of pure invention. Trust me, I'm not making this up.

I

Let's start by admitting that James Frey didn't act quite as egregiously as some. Five years after Frey's memoir came out, a guy named Herman Rosenblat wrote one of his own—Angel at the Fence—detailing the extraordinary circumstances under which he met his wife, Roma. Herman, you see, was a young Jewish child trapped in Buchenwald, and Roma was a young German child who used to throw him apples through the fence, in a highly risky act of generosity. After the war they found each other again, got married, and lived happily ever after. Oprah called this the "greatest love story" she'd ever heard. It got turned into a children's book. It almost got turned into a major motion picture.² Then it came out that the whole apple thing was baloney; the movie got shelved, the children's book got pulled, the memoir got canceled, and poor Oprah had to recant again, just as she did with Frey.

There had already been two cases like this back in the 1990s, Binjamin Wilkormiski's Fragments (1995) and Misha Defonseca's Survivre avec les loups (1997).³ Binjamin Wilkormiski, Holocaust survivor, turned out to be Bruno Grosjean, a regular Swiss guy. Misha Defonseca turned out, surprise surprise, not to have been sheltered by packs of wolves, killed a German soldier, or wandered into the Warsaw Ghetto and then escaped. Like Grosjean, she was an average non-Jewish kid, and she was in Brussels minding her own business for the entire war.⁴

Similar license was taken by one Margaret B. Jones, who, in the same year as Herman Rosenblat's rise to notoriety, wrote a memoir (Love and Consequences, 2008) about her rough start in life as a half–Native American child living in South Central Los Angeles. It talked about her joining the Bloods, running drugs for them, carrying a gun, and all kinds of other exciting things. In reality, Margaret B. Jones—sorry, Margaret Seltzer—turned out to be a fairly ordinary middle...

中文翻译：

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不要喂骗子！关于欺诈性回忆录，以及它们为什么不好

代替摘要，这里是内容的简短摘录：

• 不要喂骗子！关于欺诈性回忆录，以及它们为什么不好
• 约书亚兰迪

对我来说，这一切都始于关于詹姆斯弗雷的谈话。你知道詹姆斯·弗雷（James Frey）：他是那个在奥普拉（Oprah）上写了一本关于他作为酒鬼生活的回忆录的小伙子，然后最终不得不回到奥普拉（Oprah）上被撕成一百万个小碎片，因为他做了一堆. 在认为他的书对文学界来说是一件灾难性的事情时，我并不认为我特别有创意或有争议。但后来我碰巧用它作为谈话中某事的临时例子，突然间我发现自己遇到了阻力。“一百万个小碎片怎么了？” 有人问我。“那如果它是编造的呢？所有的回忆录都是编造的！如果读者从中得到一些东西，那又是什么呢？”¹

从那以后，我一直很好奇到底是什么问题。因为肯定有一个。我想在这里做的是就它可能是什么提出一些建议，为什么像我的对话者这样的人似乎不承认它，以及如果他们承认了，世界将如何变得更美好。我们会看到，事实上，编造一切并不是必须的。记忆并非完全不可靠；无论如何，我们并不完全任其摆布；虽然解释和排序可能会改变事件的重要性，但它们不会改变事件本身。我们将看到[End Page 137]不做，也不奖励，赤裸裸的骗子有实际的、道德的和审美的优势。我们将看到世界需要回忆录，就像它需要小说一样。我们会看到小说可以做回忆录做不到的事情，但回忆录也可以做小说——甚至是自传小说——做不到的事情。我们会看到，如果我们把回忆录类型当作小说一样，纯粹是发明的问题，那么它就无法生存。相信我，我不是编造的。

我

让我们首先承认詹姆斯弗雷的行为不像某些人那么恶劣。弗雷的回忆录出版五年后，一个名叫赫尔曼·罗森布拉特的人写了他自己的一本——围栏上的天使——详细描述了他遇到妻子罗姆的特殊情况。你看，赫尔曼是一个被困在布痕瓦尔德的犹太小孩，而罗姆是一个德国小孩，过去常常把苹果从栅栏里扔给他，这是一种非常冒险的慷慨行为。战争结束后，他们再次相遇，结婚，从此过上了幸福的生活。奥普拉称这是她听过的“最伟大的爱情故事”。它变成了一本儿童读物。它几乎变成了一部重要的电影。²然后发现整个苹果都是胡扯。电影被搁置，儿童读物被撤下，回忆录被取消，可怜的奥普拉不得不再次放弃，就像她对弗雷所做的那样。

早在 1990 年代就已经有两个这样的案例，Binjamin Wilkormiski 的Fragments (1995) 和 Misha Defonseca 的Survivre avec les loups (1997)。³大屠杀幸存者 Binjamin Wilkormiski 原来是普通的瑞士人 Bruno Grosjean。米莎·德丰塞卡（Misha Defonseca）出人意料地发现，并没有被狼群庇护，没有杀死一名德国士兵，也没有游荡到华沙犹太人区然后逃跑。和格罗斯让一样，她是一个普通的非犹太孩子，她在布鲁塞尔为整个战争处理自己的事情。⁴

一位玛格丽特·B·琼斯（Margaret B. Jones）也获得了类似的执照，在赫尔曼·罗森布拉特（Herman Rosenblat）声名狼藉的同一年，她写了一本回忆录（Love and Consequences，2008 年），讲述了她作为一个生活在南方的半美洲原住民孩子的艰难生活洛杉矶中部。它谈到了她加入血族，为他们吸毒，携带枪支以及其他各种令人兴奋的事情。实际上，玛格丽特·B·琼斯（Margaret B. Jones）——对不起，玛格丽特·塞尔策（Margaret Seltzer）——原来是一个相当普通的中间人……