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1

She should write a book about killing herself.

Posted by Mr. Poe | March 6, 2008 11:39 AM
2

yay, i love fraud. such sweet results from the stupid genre of memoirs

Posted by vooodooo84 | March 6, 2008 11:43 AM
3

OK. Here it is: My name isn't really elenchos.

There.

Posted by elenchos | March 6, 2008 11:52 AM
4

My name really is Fnarf.

There's no mystery here; if it's not in Guidestar, it's not real. It's against the law to operate a charity that isn't registered as a 501c3. The website was a book promo deal. Faye Bender and Sarah McGrath need to be fired, pronto, and blackballed from the publishing industry.

All this talk about how cripplingly expensive it would be to hire fact checkers is bullshit; the New Yorker manages, and never would have published a paragraph of this bullshit. And, really, all it took is fifteen seconds of searching. ESPECIALLY for people who work in what claims to be "non-fiction", awareness of the basic building blocks that make up the world should be mandatory.

Posted by Fnarf | March 6, 2008 11:59 AM
5

Literature is dying because of this bullshit.

Posted by Gomez | March 6, 2008 12:03 PM
6

Any literary agent who takes Inga Muscio seriously needs to be fired, pronto, and blackballed from the publishing industry.

Posted by Hooty Sapperticker | March 6, 2008 12:07 PM
7

"Fraudulence is something else. It's the obsession of the moment, this rage to detect fabrication and plagiarism. Every week there's a new scandal. I have a hunch that this reflects the way reality itself has grown treacherous and slippery since 9/11. We have good reason to mistrust what we're told--think of Colin Powell at the UN, 'These are not assertions but facts.' Now we're trying to bolt the stable door after the horse has gone. It's part of a culture of generalized suspicion, and we all have the machinery of surveillance at our fingertips. Before you phoned, of course I Googled you. We're all spies now."

--Jonathan Raban, January 2007

What he said.

Posted by Jeff Stevens | March 6, 2008 12:24 PM
8

Raban's missing part of the point. Yes, we live in a culture of suspicion. But we also live in a culture where large portions of the populace have totally abandoned the idea of truth. These chickens at Penguin were ripe for the plucking, because they have given notice that they, and their whole industry, don't give a shit if their stuff is true or not until they get caught.

Posted by Fnarf | March 6, 2008 1:04 PM
9

I can't understand how things like this happen. It would seem that a small amount of fact checking would ID this as fraud.

Plus, I fail to understand her motivation for making it a memoir. As yesterday's NYTimes piece pointed out, she could have done this a number of other ways and still had it published.

Posted by PA Native | March 6, 2008 1:08 PM
10

Well, the reality may be worse, but the story just got a lot better. The sheer level of venality here is just awesome. What a scam!

Posted by Ramdu | March 6, 2008 1:35 PM
11

Fnarf @8,

"large portions of the populace have totally abandoned the idea of truth"

Actually, that's a core part of what Raban said. When he was reading around Seattle to promote Surveillance, he kept making that point, referring each time to that Colin Powell quote and saying that the increasing slipperiness of "truth" in our society these days was a core theme of that novel. He also, I recall, discussed James Frey in the same context, that controversy being still fresh at the time (January 2007). So, yeah, what he said.

Posted by Jeff Stevens | March 6, 2008 2:11 PM
12

I defer to the wisdom of Jonathan Raban, who is ten times smarter than I even dare dream to be.

Posted by Fnarf | March 6, 2008 2:28 PM

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