Saturday, March 01, 2008

Memoir Update

News from The Associated Press: "BOSTON (AP) -- Almost nothing Misha Defonseca wrote about herself or her horrific childhood during the Holocaust was true.

She didn't live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn't trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She's not even Jewish.

Defonseca, a Belgian writer now living in Massachusetts, admitted through her lawyers this week that her best-selling book, 'Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years,' was an elaborate fantasy she kept repeating, even as the book was translated into 18 languages and made into a feature film in France."

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

The living with wolves should have been a red flag, and due to the fact so many suffered so terribly, she shouldn't have made a dime with her bull. Joe

Unknown said...

True. But she made a lot more than a dime.

Anonymous said...

One wonders if she published before or after Jean George's JULIE OF THE WOLVES. And why ask for proof when everyone is having such a wonderfully miserable time?

My own fictional memoir, based on all the Todd Masons one brings up with a search engine (I'm not sure it's significant to TMs or to search engines that so many are in journalism, television production, and related fields, aside from the snowboarder), should be forthcoming soon...the first Vantage Press NYT bestseller, to be sure. (There's even a Canadian TM who, like myself only of professional quality, is a trombonist and singer, in a ska band, and I certainly like ska.)

Anonymous said...

Some twenty years after, I see, in the 1990s. Well, perhaps reading the George novel at early ages helped soften the credulity meters of various people along the chain. Or something.

Cap'n Bob said...

How this didn't become an Oprah Book Club pick I'll never know.