Telling Tales by Melissa Katsoulis

Author:Melissa Katsoulis
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9781472107831
Publisher: Constable

6

MEMOIRS

TAKE A LOOK at the non-fiction bestseller charts and today, as ten years ago, you will see one trend which (apart from TV tie-ins and recipe books) dominates. The tell-all autobiography. Whether the author is famous already or merely hoping to become so as a result of laying bare their struggle with addiction, abuse, illness or loss, there is a seemingly inexhaustible market for the ever more incredible memoirs of the heirs of Dave Pelzer, the American who blazed the trail with his phenomenally successful A Child Called ‘It’. Pelzer, like a more recent British exponent of the genre, Constance Briscoe, has had to face accusations from family members that his tale of childhood misery is not authentic. But those allegations pale into insignificance next to the master of the dodgy misery memoir, James Frey: his revolting, brilliantly written A Million Little Pieces fooled Oprah Winfrey and millions of others until he was forced to apologize in one of the most unforgiving trials by talk-show host ever broadcast.

His story is instructive and says a lot about the desperation of US publishers to produce the next worst life story. But two generations earlier, amid the heady literary salons of pre-war New York, a plucky young hoaxer with an equally eye-popping tale to tell set about writing a memoir which was only marginally less outrageous than Frey’s. She called herself Joan Lowell and, although now largely forgotten, she was the true progenitor of the phoney genre that continues to strike fear into the heart of publishers everywhere.

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