WHY I LIED: AUTHORS WHO FAKED THEIR STORIES
Does the true identity of a writer really matter? Authors who fabricated literary personas share how their fantasies became nightmares. On the first day of this year’s Jaipur literary festival, the American novelist AJ Finn, real name Dan
Mallory, was interviewed on stage. He talked about enjoying the success of The Woman in
the Window, the thriller he wrote in one year, in one draft, which made him a multimillionaire. He talked about his diagnosis with bipolar II disorder, and the parallel between women’s struggle to be taken seriously and that experienced by people with mental health problems. He also mentioned some of the drawbacks of success. “I am dealing with a particularly unpleasant journalist in the US,” he told news18.com after the event. “This particular journalist, and there have been a few others, hears that I or someone else has a mental health issue, and is like: ‘Oh! I am going to find out what is wrong with you, and rummage through your past and see what you did.’ It’s a little concerning, especially because you don’t remember what you did when you weren’t acting like yourself.”
Six days later, on 30 January, Mallory was able to recall lying to his friends and colleagues for many years about having cancer. “I felt intensely ashamed of my psychological struggles,” he explained in a statement sent to the New Yorker. “I was utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew.” Five days later the New Yorker published a profile of Mallory, which alleged or implied that he had also lied, among other things, about having a doctorate from Oxford; his mother dying; his brother taking his own life; and about discovering JK Rowling as a crime writer.
Fiction writers are professional fantasists, so perhaps you’d expect to find a few who can’t restrict their fantasies to the page. In fact, there are so many that it is tempting to wonder whether literary imposture ought to have a syndrome of its own. If so,
Mallory, although his lies don’t amount to a crime, belongs in a distinct subtype alongside Jeffrey Archer, who went to prison for perjury and has lied about many minor things. These writers are ambitious and often charming commercial novelists whose gift for storytelling sometimes looks like a skill they have harnessed, sometimes like a compulsion that they can’t control. Perhaps you’d include the crime writers Stephen Leather and RJ
Ellory who used online aliases to trash their rivals’ books and praise their own. Generally, their lies do little harm to their careers, because the truth of an author’s life means little to a reader in search of entertainment.
Mallory argues that a writer’s life is irrelevant in any case. “I am not especially interested in author’s bios,” he told the Observer last year. “I am buying their novel, not their memoir. I view it as a sign of respect to not want to know too much.”
In practice, complete ignorance of the author is impossible. A name alone carries information, even if it is coded in assumptions. Take Rahila Khan, whose stories about British Asian teenagers were broadcast on the BBC, leading to a book called Down
the Road, Worlds Away being published by Virago in 1987. Khan was in fact a man teaching RE in a girls’ boarding school. Her real name was the Rev Toby Forward.
Forward had wanted modern writing with a Muslim background to use in his lessons, but found little, so he wrote his own. He wondered if Radio 4 might be interested, but was terrified of rejection so he sent a story under a nom de plume. “It felt like a barrier,” he now says. “I didn’t want them to write back to ‘Toby Forward’ saying, ‘Your stuff is shit’… I chose a name that was appropriate to the material. That was all.”
When the BBC wanted another story, they wrote to Khan, and Khan wrote back. The BBC didn’t like it when she wrote about white boys, so she returned to Asian girls. Forward borrowed his great-grandfather’s name “Tom
Dale” for the next white boy stories, which he wrote on a different typewriter, with the postal address of his assistant. The Dale stories were also broadcast, and Forward started to enjoy himself. “I wanted to have a whole week of Radio 4 morning stories, all by me under different names,” he says.
Still, Khan was the star. Listeners loved her work. Khan was encouraged to publish. The only imprints taking this type of short story were the Women’s Press and Virago.
Forward hoped that Virago would back out when he refused to meet them. When they didn’t, Khan signed a contract. There is no good time to admit you’ve been deceiving people, but later is worse. Forward confessed to his agent, who told Virago, who removed the books from sale and pulped them, furious.
Critics said that Forward had stolen an opportunity from a real Asian woman. He insists this never occurred to him, nor would it, because he doesn’t see fiction that way. The alter egos, as he wrote at the time, “released me from the obligation of being what I seem to be so that I can write as I really am”. When it comes to an author’s life, he agrees with Mallory: “It shouldn’t matter to the reader who this person is.”
Yet sometimes it matters a great deal. A novel about the Holocaust such as
The Painted Bird (1965) feels different if you know that it was written by a survivor –
Jerzy Kosinski .
Most commonly, novelists pretend that they’re not novelists at all. Indeed those were the novel’s origins, in fake memoirs such as Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe.
There’s James Frey’s addiction memoir A
Million Little Pieces, which was published in 2003 and exposed in 2006.
If we want to know why people keep doing this, we should ask why we keep believing them. This collection of cases offers an answer. Almost every one claimed to experience more obvious hardship and disadvantage than they really did. They inspired us, because triumph over adversity is the world’s favourite story. We forget that it is also the least likely route for a triumph to take. There would be no successful fantasists if there were no audience for stories that are too good to check.
Memoirists who lie are often in breach of contract with their publishers. Novelists, however, sign a contract to promise that their book is lying. If they also lie about their life, perhaps dropping hints of autobiography, there may well be no legal consequence at all.
Archer appeared at this year’s Jaipur literary festival too. His event drew huge crowds. He was also interviewed afterwards by news18. com. “If you look at the audience outside,”
Archer said, “over 3,000 people who came to hear me speak … If you ask me: ‘Well, explain it, Jeffrey. We want to know why have they come.’ I do not understand it myself.” Professional liars are good at being forgiven.
Fiction writers are professional fantasists, so perhaps you’d expect to find a few who can’t restrict their fantasies to the page.