The author is of course responsible. He’s the one who’s lying. But the publisher shares responsibility. They don’t do even the most minimal due diligence. Part of the reason, a small part, is naivte: they can’t believe someone made the whole thing up. Made a whole life up! A larger part is sheer calculation: why check it when it’s so moving, so helpful, and will make so much money? ‘On the off chance it’s all a lie and we get caught we’ll just say we trusted our author, which is what publishers do.’ I would add that old editors are in the professional habit of trusting authors. In a time when they’re under terrible bottom line pressure, it’s nice to take refuge in old habits. Young editors seem to me a little like the fake memoir writers themselves, not deeply sensitive to issues of ‘true’ and ‘not true.’

Why is there a market for the memoirs? Because life is full of suffering. It’s hard. It is understandable that readers would enjoy finding someone who suffered terribly and yet survived, triumphed. ‘She came from that and wrote a great bestseller.’ ‘If he could come through that, then I can come through what’s happening to me now.’ This, by the way, is part of the reason that books such as David Copperfield and Jane Eyre are beloved. But Dickens didn’t say he was David Copperfield, he said he created, in part out of his own experience of life, a fictional character named David Copperfield. He made it up and was proud to have made it up, as he should have been. He was a writer. He wrote a masterpiece.

What is startling is that the fake memoir writers seem, always, surprised and contrite when caught. As if they didn’t know it was wrong. How could they not have known? I don’t know. A guess. A number of them are young or youngish, and perhaps we should wonder what we’ve been teaching them the past 30 years about what is right and what is wrong and how to tell the difference. Some of them — I mean those who aren’t just barking mad — seem to be operating under the rules of some kind of moral and ethical relativism. ‘I can make up a story about how painful the lives of the unnoticed, the marginalized, are, and in doing this I will help open the eyes of those who came from comfort, who had it easy. This is a public good.’ They weigh their lying against the good they imagine might come of it, and vote for the good, giving themselves an out for lying. Which is very convenient, because in voting for the ‘good’ they vote for their own profit, fame, and success.

I’ll add one thing about the environment the fake memoir writers are operating in, not to be sympathetic to them but to point out a truth. Novels used to be respected. They used to deal with real life and be bought by people who were living real lives. Now American fiction is…thin, removed from life, full of pose, full of abstractions that have a lot to do with the author’s mind and little to do with the readers’. I grew up surrounded by friends reading novels, and I read novels. And we talked about them just about through the 1980’s, and then we stopped. I have only one friend who reads novels now.

When novels become removed from life, tales of ‘real life’ just might benefit. Because people will always read. This country is full of readers. But they want to read something real. Why are young novelists doing work that seems so removed from life? America became rich. Affluence detaches. It detaches from the facts of life. It makes a life less real. And so the work produced by that life will be less real. We have also, as a nation, arguably, in some areas, become educated beyond our intelligence. The young Brown graduate down the block: she knows everything about writing, about tone and paragraph blocking, she’s read a lot that’s been written already, she’s highly literate. But she has nothing to say. She’s barely lived a life. She’ll soon write a novel.

Me, I’m sticking with history. The battle really happened, the bill was really passed. It all actually occurred.

After my second novel came out, I no longer wanted to write fiction. I went to an analyst to try and work through this, and in the spring of 1989, I found myself reliving a drama from my deepest childhood. A trance-like moment in group therapy, followed by vivid dreams told me that my grandfather’s driver had molested me when I was five years old. The pressure of this secret had to be the reason my urge to write fiction had vanished. It seemed my duty to expose my private humiliation in print.

I told a publisher, who thought this was pretty interesting stuff. No one was interested in my fiction, but a terrible true story was something else. Something that might sell, as opposed to my usual Franco-American cultural meanderings. Something people could relate to; something universal. Something universal that, oddly, seemed to be more universal every day.

Because, oddly, everyone I knew who was going to a shrink was finding out that they, too, had been abused: molested by uncles, by friends of their parents, by neighbors, by passing strangers. Inducted, some of them, into satanic cults where they had to worship the devil and have sex with little boys.

We would all have dinner and compare notes. There wasn’t a lot to go on. My evidence was mainly from dreams of mute commissionaires and talking dolls. Some of us asked our parents what had happened. Parents, siblings, and cousins claimed to have absolutely no memories of any horrible events. You could sense the cover-up; they were in on the plot. I asked my mother about my grandfather’s driver. All she said was: "Joseph was a good man.” I was still suspicious of my mother the day she died.

Did I believe anything had really happened to me? It made a very good story to tell myself. It explained this and that; it was elegant, like a theory. It would have made a juicy book, but I didn’t write it. It didn’t feel right. I wasn’t absolutely sure.

A few years ago, it was revealed that between 1986 and 1994, a huge number of people in therapy suddenly recovered memories of childhood abuse, because that’s what therapists were looking for in those years. My devastating recollection was in fact nothing more than part of a passing fashion, a fad, a trend.