Truth or consequences

In the wake of the Frey imbroglio, Janice Erlbaum, whose memoir Girlbomb is being launched with a certain amount of fanfare, was grilled by her publisher as to the veracity of her hard-knocks memoir, USA Today reported Thursday. (The piece was actually a sidebar to a larger piece about the issue of truth and fiction in memoirs.)

I had just read the prominent feature on Erlbaum and her book in the March/April Poets and Writers, so this made a ton of sense. Not only does Erlbaum, like the disgraced Frey, recount an experience of recovering from addiction, but in her P&W interview (not available online) she freely admits that she developed an ability to lie in order to cope with the stress of being leaving home as a teenager and making her own way.

Erlbaum is modest and self-conscious to the degree that she's unlikely ever to call herself a great performer, but she freely amits that she knows how to lie. "I used to be a big liar," she says. "I wanted people to pay attention to me and to notice me and to think that I was special.... I lied for a long time." .... [In a group home, she was identified as] Janice the Liar. The one who lied to everyone, all the time."

So what do you do with someone who, on the one hand, publishes a book full of edgy anecdotes and presents it as her life story, and on the other tells interviewers she is (or was) a polished liar? Is she playing a little game with us? If some of the larger events in the book (and I'm not talking about the usual things autobiographers do, like imagine the details of conversations decades past no one could possibly remember) turn out to be false, then she might well say "Hey, I told you in no uncertain terms I was a practiced liar."

I genuinely hope things don't turn out that way. Since coming across her blog a few months ago I've really enjoyed reading it, and I'm looking forward to reading her book. But I don't blame her publisher for putting her on the hot seat for at least a few minutes. Nobody wants to see the lucrative genre of triumph-over-adversity memoirs get completely undermined by authors' inability to resist the temptation to pump things up.

Previously: Stephen Elliott on veracity in memoirs: "People have such entirely different memories of the same events that reality becomes impossible. Reality is interpretation."

Janice Erlbaum, writers,memoirs