She might have had a brilliant career as a writer of fiction. Why the urge to claim it's all true? Don't people know the impact of the Internet and mass media, not to mention a multi-city book tour?

As the article notes, this type of thing seems to be happening more often recently. I wonder how many of the popular books of the past are actually entirely fabricated. (The Education of Little Tree springs to mind.)

Is this a good allegory for the lives of many people, believing that they have lived noble lives when they have not? If one relies on subjective self-assessment there is no lie at all.

Pull it, recategorize it as fiction, then send it back out? Come clean early.

Then resolve to add perspective to one's own vocabulary, on a daily basis.

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none,

Why ask why? (Picture the many memoirs that remain unwritten, for fear of being revealed as a fraud, in real life. Better to pass, in silence, without ever being found out? Sad.)

Ah, shades of Rigoberta Menchu. It's okay to lie, as long as it's for a good cause, right? /sarcasm/

Hey, if there's egg on Michiko Kakutani's face, then I've had my schadenfreude moment for the day.

Not to claim 20/20 hindsight, but in reading about this woman last week in several places, it did strike me as somewhat off that this tiny white girl was so seamlessly a part of the Crips/Bloods world that was described.

Interesting that her own sister narced her out.

Interesting perspective, pdxnag.

I don't understand why she didn't categorize the book as fiction, given that since the advent of Oprah's book club choices, reading social realism is once again in fashion.

I don't understand why she didn't categorize the book as fiction

sales, madam, sales.
fiction is the toughest sell of all these days. nonfiction is the easiest.