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Accusations against Greg Mortenson highlight how many authors in the genre take a relaxed approach to accuracy
The carcass of Greg Mortenson's memoir Three Cups of Tea is being picked over in public as the Pakistani tribesmen he claims kidnapped him prepare to sue him and his publisher, Viking, "carefully review[s] the materials with the author".
But Mortenson is far from the first memoirist to fall from grace. From Surviving with Wolves by Misha Defonseca, who admitted in 2008 that her bestselling tale of living with a pack of wolves as she fled the Nazis was nothing more than a tale, to James Frey, who confessed under fire that his hit memoir, A Million Little Pieces, contained embellishments, readers these days would be forgiven for beginning to question the veracity of every memoir they read.
"We don't fact-check with memoirs, unless there are elements which could be libellous or damaging to other people," admits Roland Philipps, managing director of John Murray, which publishes Frey. "A memoir is a different beast to an autobiography, which is a factual account, but a memoir is a literary form, in which some parts will be played up or down because it's much more internal, how it felt to the author."
But a publisher has to be able, he says, "to trust the author to have a central truth". Literary agent Luigi Bonomi of LBA agrees. "Apart from some basic fact checking, publishers absolutely have to rely on authors telling the truth – particularly if it's a personal narrative, the veracity of which is only known to the author."
"There is a publishing assumption that authors warrant they have not plagiarised nor made facts up that are purporting to be facts," says his fellow agent Jonny Geller, who will work to verify stories himself before he sells them as much as possible. "However, we expect fact verifications to be done by the publishers. In reality, this is rarely done. Publishers are willing to spend time and money on libel readings, but I have never had an editor question the premise or individual fact on a non-fiction book."
Author Andrew Crofts, who has ghost-written a host of memoirs, believes it's better this way. "It is my experience that British publishers don't tend to check facts in these sorts of emotion-based stories unless (a) there is something that doesn't ring true, or (b) there is a danger of libel," says Crofts. "I am very happy with (a). I tend to like books to be a matter of intuition, colour, emotional power and strong passions. I'm not a great fan of too many 'facts' in a narrative."
But with an increasing number of memoirs being discredited – as well as Frey and Defonseca, recent years have seen Kathy O'Beirne exposed for making up parts of her misery memoir, Don't Ever Tell; Herman Rosenblat found to have lied about his romantic experiences during the Holocaust in Angel at the Fence: the True Story of a Love That Survived; and Margaret B Jones inventing a poverty-stricken, drug-ridden childhood in her memoir In Love and Consequences – isn't there a danger the public is going to stop believing in the genre as a whole?
Not necessarily: bad news, when it comes to books, can often be good news. Sales of A Million Little Pieces jumped from around 400-500 to around 1,500 copies a week in the UK in the first few months of 2006 when it was revealed that sections were made up, says the Bookseller's charts editor, Philip Stone, while in January 2007, following the Celebrity Big Brother racism row, sales of the late Jade Goody's memoir jumped 71% week on week.
"In 2006, overall sales of memoirs were up 12% on 2005, so I don't think that sales of memoirs in general were affected by the fact it was revealed Frey (and perhaps others) embellished, mis-recollected, or all-out lied about certain events," says Stone. It's all a question of degree, believes Philipps. "People respond to James Frey saying 'I don't care which bits you exaggerated or made up, it's still a beautiful book' – they're responding to it as a piece of literature.
"In the case of Three Cups of Tea, they are responding more to his external experiences and [the current situation] is potentially damaging for certain books [of that type] – the memoirs of people in extreme situations in extreme places."
Stone agrees. "I fully believe that sales of Three Cups of Tea will immediately have gone up following the column inches it has been getting, but [if the rumours are proven to be true] there may well be some much longer-term sales damage to the sort of humanitarian memoir genre in which Three Cups of Tea sits," he says.
"The UK public are very sceptical, and some book buyers may well think twice in the future before buying a similar title – especially Three Cups of Tea readers (of which there are many – about 3.5 million in the US, and 130,000 in the UK) who may feel they've been let down."