Though Kingsley Amis’s novel Difficulties with Girls was published in 1988, it contains a passage that might as well have been cocked at the “fake memoir” epidemic of the decade just concluded. Amis’s hero, Patrick Standish, who works for a British publishing house, has been asked his opinion of a manuscript bearing the portentous title Blood in the Tigris:
“I have to say bluntly at the outset that I found this book something of a disappointment after Dreamtime Children of Ayers Rock” (outdid even that hotchpotch of illiterate fabrication)… . “Now nobody’s asking for strict historical truth” (more than a faint concern for probability) “but here and there” (throughout) “the author seems to be writing pure fantasy” (at a level to defeat comparison).
One is tempted to marvel at Amis’s prescience, but, as Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History demonstrates, authors, editors, and publishers have been trafficking in maudlin, brutal, sensationalistic schlock since, if not quite time immemorial, at least several hundred years before that infamous fabricator James Frey (A Million Little Pieces) submitted to verbal bastinado on “Oprah” for his crimes against literature and the public trust.
Of course, memoir is a great deal older than that. Yagoda begins with Julius Caesar’s third-person Commentarii de Bello Gallico (50 B.C.), then moves on to the fifth-century Confessions of Augustine of Hippo, then identifies the first and arguably most miserable “misery memoir,” the twelfth-century Historia Calamitatumof Peter Abelard, a French monk
