Fake of the month: author defends book

It's phase two in the cycle of Fake Memoir Disease: "The author defends her book." (This follows phase one, "Shocking allegations of fraud," and preceeds phase three, "Publisher now says book was originally presented as a novel.")

Our contestant this month is Kathy O'Beirne, whose memoir "Don't Ever Tell" is about "childhood rape, physical abuse and incarceration in Ireland's notorious Magdalene laundries."

Aside from the publishing scandal, this is a classic example of the post-feminist dilemma of feeling guilty for doubting a tale of rape and abuse. In the last 25 years of the 20th Century we were taught always to give credence to these stories, because it is so difficult for the survivors (we were also taught not to use the word "victims") of rape and abuse to tell their stories at all -- and that it is very important for the stories to be told. And all that is as it should be. At the same time, we're not supposed to raise the possibility that any of these tales might be false, even though they occasionally are, because that risks returning to the bad old days when women weren't believed and were silenced, which made it possible for abuse and rape to continue. So when doubts are raised, it's almost transgressive to do so.

It makes for a very emotionally and politically charged atmosphere. Since Ireland is famously backward when it comes to 20th Century social movements, perhaps they may not have been through something like this on the scale of the Tawana Brawley scandal of the 1980s, in which these dynamics were played out on the main stage of the New York media.

If and when highly visible accusations of rape and abuse are disproved or admitted to be false, everybody loses. The supposed victim is utterly discredited; some of this discredit rubs off on other, legitimate survivors; the general populace doubts more. Even if 999 out of 1000 stories of rape are true, the other 1 muddies the water for all the rest.

This is why it's important for such memoirs to be true. It's not enough for them to just be good stories or have good entertainment value. They actually have to be true, and if some details have to be fictionalized to protect someone's privacy, then it should be clear which details those are. The analogy with photography is instructive. Nowadays you can fake anything with a camera and some computer software, and a few high-profile cases have made the whole medium of photojournalism, much less photography in general, suspect in the eyes of some. That's not what we want.