Oh no, not another psychopathic nun

[bijou]

On the face of it, the exposure of Margaret B Jones, the latest contributor to the thriving phoney memoir genre, looks bad for aspiring liars. Penguin USA, which is now pulping her book, Love and Consequences, insists that its editors mind terribly about the truth and worked tirelessly to confirm that the 'humanising' story of a sexually abused, half-native American foster-child raised in a warm-hearted criminal family was authentic and not, as it emerged last week, a work of fiction, by a creative writing student called Margaret Seltzer.

For instance, the publisher appears to have established that the phone number for Margaret B Jones was indeed answered by a person calling herself Margaret. A friend of Margaret's corroborated her story and so did someone else Margaret knew. And perhaps it is too easy to criticise Penguin's employees for not having asked Ms Seltzer, who is white, why she didn't look a bit more, sort of, half-native American. Maybe she wore a balaclava. If it was tact that stopped editors commenting on any perceived dissimilarity from the kind of argot-spouting street person who received a gun for her 13th birthday in the 'hood, then this kind of courtesy is, surely, something of which we see too little these days.

In fact, compared with the publisher of another false memoir, Surviving With Wolves, in which a Belgian pensioner using the name Misha Defonseca depicts herself as a Jewish girl who survived the Shoah courtesy of some hairy friends, you might think that Penguin has little to apologise for. Long before Defonseca (actually Monique De Wael) admitted last week that her bestselling confessions were untrue - 'It is not the true reality, but it's my reality, my way of surviving' - many readers had spotted her for a fake.

...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/mar/09/booksnews

Quite a funny demolition of the ever popular abuse books.  Some of the comments are funny too.