LITERARY HOAXES

As Steve Rose reveals the bizarre story of the true identity of JT LeRoy (Page 10), Pat Fitzpatrick has a look at some other famous literary hoaxes

1 PENELOPE ASHE Her book, Naked Came the Stranger, made The New York Times Best Seller List in 1969. Who could have predicted so many people would want to read the story of a suburban housewife who decided to have sex with all the men in the area? We all did. Turns out it was a hoax, written by a group of journalists, to show that any old muck could sell, as long as it was about sex. Some say they couldn’t possibly have been driven by greed and a sense of smug superiority. We say, “Have you ever met a journalist?”

2 KONRAD KUJAU In 1983, Kujau managed to sell his forged Hitler diaries to German magazine Stern, and to the The Sunday Times. The episode damaged a lot of reputations, except Hitler’s, because his couldn’t get any worse. Konrad got the idea for his Hitler diaries after he built a career selling Nazi memorabilia. Who knew that you could get into the mind of an unhinged madman by dealing with guys who want to buy a belt-buckle from the SS? Again, we all did.

3 MARGARET B JONES The 2008 memoir, Love and Consequences, tells of the author’s life growing up as a half Native American foster-child with gangbangers in LA. It would be wrong to say that all this is bullshit. Her first name is Margaret. Everything else, Margaret Seltzer made up. A word on the term ‘gangbanger’. It means something different in the US. When we told Americans what ‘gang bang’ means here, they laughed their fannies off.

4 JONATHAN SWIFT Swift’s anonymous 1729 essay, A Modest Proposal, suggested a solution to overpopulation and poverty in Ireland. Feed the children of the poor to the rich. That’s disgusting. Poor kids are tough. You’d be chewing all day. (Sorry.) A Modest Proposal remains one of the most famous instances of satire. As we know, satire can be defined as anything that is laughed at by a pack of eejits. Or, as they are sometimes known, the audience on Mock the Week.

5 JAMES FREY Some say Frey’s autobiography, A Million Little Pieces, wasn’t a classic hoax. Try and tell that to the bookshop workers who had to move his work into the fiction department. Heavy, man. It turns out he had fabricated and exaggerated a lot of material about his crazy drinkand-drug addiction. It turns out, once more, people had failed to ask the obvious question about a ‘my drug-crazed madness’ memoir: How can you remember any of it?