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... has surfaced, one so chock-full of pain that it makes James Frey's sad, made-up tale look wholesome.
In June of 1999 a writer calling himself Nasdijj emerged from obscurity to publish an ode to his adopted son in Esquire. “My son is dead,” he began. “I didn’t say my adopted son is dead. He was my son. My son was a Navajo. He lived six years. They were the best six years of my life.”
The boy’s name was Tommy Nothing Fancy and Nasdijj wrote that he and his wife adopted Tommy as an infant and raised him in their home on the Navajo reservation. At first, Tommy seemed like a healthy baby, albeit one who consistently cried throughout the night. “The doctor at the Indian Health Service said it was nothing. Probably gas.”
But it wasn’t gas. Tommy suffered from a severe case of fetal alcohol syndrome, or FAS. Though Tommy looked normal, his crying continued and as he grew older he began to suffer massive seizures. “I thought I could see him getting duller with every seizure. He knew he was slowly dying.”
And on and on, all of it fiction offered in the guise of a memoir. LA Weekly fingers a white, suburban kid from Lansing, Michigan named Tim Barrus — student council, drama club, very preppy.
The Esquire article was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and led to 3 book contracts — each of them published to critical acclaim. And every word of all of them lies about a miserable, made-up life of minority oppression.
How on earth do such things happen? Once you drill down through the details, the bottom line is that they happen for the same reason that Stephen Glass, Janet Cooke and a host of others got away with their fantastic tales: editors want to believe them because they comport with their biases.
First thought: yet another one! Second thought: what on earth is going on here? These impostures are piling up, and surely, if one were to look across them, somehow they must _mean_ something.
I'm thinking beyond the current rash (Frey, McCoy, and now Barrus) to people like Laurel Willson (who morphed first into a survivor of satanic abuse and then, when that was exposed, "became" a Holocaust survivor associated with the Benjamin Wilkomirski fraud); Mike Warnke (another satanic "survivor"); and David Pelzer, whose claims of extreme abuse have come into question. All of these people appear to have somehow internalized the prospect of Very Bad Things happening to them, in ways that make them convincing enough to persuade friends, audiences, and, of course, publishers.
I think one has to ask questions about the extent to which each really "believes" the events they recount, as well how their audiences can continue to find validity in the "emotional truth" of events that are themselves at the very least distorted or exaggerated. And then there's the money and attention angle; frankly, I think it's one thing to pretend to be a gay junkie hooker and then write novels in that person's name (thanks, JT); it's another to pass oneself off as child-victim of Mengele or a true narrator of the Native American experience (and get a PEN award for it, for chrissakes!). The former is a kind of identity play that has a certain wit and verve; the latter is, to be less than charitable, really scummy....
1 Comments:
First thought: yet another one! Second thought: what on earth is going on here? These impostures are piling up, and surely, if one were to look across them, somehow they must _mean_ something.
I'm thinking beyond the current rash (Frey, McCoy, and now Barrus) to people like Laurel Willson (who morphed first into a survivor of satanic abuse and then, when that was exposed, "became" a Holocaust survivor associated with the Benjamin Wilkomirski fraud); Mike Warnke (another satanic "survivor"); and David Pelzer, whose claims of extreme abuse have come into question. All of these people appear to have somehow internalized the prospect of Very Bad Things happening to them, in ways that make them convincing enough to persuade friends, audiences, and, of course, publishers.
I think one has to ask questions about the extent to which each really "believes" the events they recount, as well how their audiences can continue to find validity in the "emotional truth" of events that are themselves at the very least distorted or exaggerated. And then there's the money and attention angle; frankly, I think it's one thing to pretend to be a gay junkie hooker and then write novels in that person's name (thanks, JT); it's another to pass oneself off as child-victim of Mengele or a true narrator of the Native American experience (and get a PEN award for it, for chrissakes!). The former is a kind of identity play that has a certain wit and verve; the latter is, to be less than charitable, really scummy....
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