https://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2008/03/12/literary_hoaxes_and_the_prolet/feed/PJ Media is a leading news site covering culture, politics, faith, homeland security, and more. Our reporters and columnists provide original, in-depth analysis from a variety of perspectives.en-usWed, 10 Jun 2026 08:14:31 -0400<![CDATA[Over at Armavirumque, James Piereson has a fascinating roundup of some recent literary hoaxes. One unifying trait of the contemporary literary hoax is that it is focussed downwards, towards the depths of society. It used to be that a poor chap, born on the wrong side of the tracks, would dream of better things and, if he was of a fabricating literary bent, would frame a story of some grandeur for himself. Today, we find middle- or upper-middle-class folk who think it is chic (because, it is chic from a commercial perspective) to invent lives of squalor for themselves. Hence what Piereson aptly describes as the &#8220;cavalcade&#8221; of fake memoirs about drug addicts, concentration camp survivors, etc., etc. Fragments, by one Binjamin Wilkomirski, recounts “how he survived as a Latvian Jewish orphan in a Nazi concentration camp”&#8211;only he did because he was never there; Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca, &#8220;depicts her life as a Jewish child on the run from the Nazis during the war and in search of her parents,&#8221; but really she was born a Catholic in Belgium and just made up the story; Sarah, by J. T. Leroy, was supposedly about “the son of a West Virginia truck stop prostitute,” but it was really by Laura Albert, a 42-year-old white woman living in San Francisco. And on it goes. A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey, was about the life of an addict. Oprah loved it&#8211;until it was shown that Frey had made it all up. This literary exercise in nostalgie de la boue tells us a lot about our culture. As Piereson notes,]]>Wed, 12 Mar 2008 16:54:45 -0400<![CDATA[Roger Kimball]]>https://pjmedia.com/roger-kimball/2008/03/12/literary_hoaxes_and_the_prolet-n114628