An Old Story

By Michael Kinsley

A tearful Alan Greenspan confessed yesterday that he never was Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, as he alleged in his best-selling autobiography, Irrational Exuberance, published last fall. The book's melodramatic descriptions of gray-haired men sitting around large conference tables talking about things like "libor" and "basis points" were "complete fiction," Greenspan now admits. He said he would return the $8.5 million advance he received from his publisher "just as soon as I can get back to the Fed and print it. Oh, wait. I made that up. I've never been inside the Fed in my life. I guess they're out of luck."

It's getting to be an old story. In recent days, two celebrated autobiographies have been exposed as fakes. The New York Times reported that Love and Consequences, a book about growing up half--Native American in the gangland of South Central Los Angeles, was actually written by a white woman who grew up in the suburban San Fernando Valley. The author, Margaret Seltzer, was ratted out by her sister, who had seen her picture and story featured, with total credulity, in the Times's own House & Home section the previous week.

The other autophoniography exposed last week was by a woman now living in Dudley, Mass., named Misha Defonseca. In Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust, not yet published in the U.S. but already celebrated in Europe, she claims that she was adopted by a pack of wolves who protected her from the Nazis. The French have even made a movie about this episode, called Surviving with Wolves.

Why do they do it? For the same reason you do it. Oh, yes, you do. The temptation to embroider an anecdote is nearly universal. Did Uncle Charlie really parade around the house stark naked when he got drunk that time, or did he just strip to his underwear? Did it really snow 3 ft. in half an hour during that storm last winter? It's a long way from this to imagining that you were adopted by wolves during the Holocaust, but you can sort of get what Defonseca is driving at when she says in her defense that the yarn "is not actually reality, but my reality."

Then, too, there is the amazing fact that book publishers--unlike newspaper and magazine publishers--do virtually nothing to check or warrant the accuracy of what they print. They won't knowingly publish a fraud, but they won't take the first step to expose one. In fact, they don't even seem to turn on their baloney detectors when they sit down to read a manuscript. One phone call could have exposed Seltzer's tale. And as for Defonseca, certainly there are many true stories of surviving the Holocaust that strain credulity. But adopted by wolves? Please.

Why this different standard for books? In part, I think, it's because books have no Letters to the Editor and no other easy way for readers to dissent or call bluffs. Every book has small mistakes that go uncorrected, and these encourage bigger mistakes and outright fabrications. I was sure when the Internet came along that a site would arise and be acknowledged as the semiofficial Letters to the Editor column for books. But so far, it hasn't happened.

It is time for a prestigious commission to re-examine all autobiographies, including classics like Rousseau's Confessions and The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. That business about walking through Philadelphia carrying bread rolls under his arms has a suspiciously raconteurial told-once-too-often feel about it, don't you think? And anything involving wolves requires special scrutiny. It's only a matter of time until Little Red Riding Hood admits that her story was "exaggerated" to protect her grandma, who at the time was "still in the closet." (The Big Bad Wolf, in his version of the story, will promise to "deal with the cross-dressing issue" and declare, "Red is green with envy. All she can say is, 'What a big advance you got.'")

Barack Obama's third book arrived in bookstores this week. Called Hussein Is My Middle Name, it describes his devotion to Islam, his terrorist training at a madrasah in Indonesia and his commitment to wasteful government spending and tax increases. The book also details the romantic story of how he fell in love with his wife Michelle when he heard her declare how much she hates America.

Obama concedes that none of this is true. "These are all rumors that I am hoping to discredit," he said, "and I know of no better way to do that than by putting them in a book."