When is a memoir not a memoir...?

...when it's fiction, yo.

You'd have thought James Frey cutting Oprah down to size (for about a jillionth of a nanosecond) would have been enough for the PTB of the publishing industry, but no, here they go again. Two more "memoirs" have revealed to be complete fabrications. Misha Defonseca (Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust years) turns out to come from a nice settled Belgian family, and - good heavens - didn't actually spend the Second World War roaming Europe as a small Jewish girl in the company of wolves. And Margaret B. Jones, who wrote Love and Consequences, a memoir of being a mixed-race teenager running drugs in South Central, turns out to actually be Margaret Seltzer, a nice white girl from Sherman Oaks.

Part of me wants to smack both these women with a big hairy cluestick: Jesus h. wept, what were you thinking, you had these stories in your head, why in hell didn't you just write them as fiction? That's what they are. But it seems that the sure way to get an idiot publisher to buy the pretty story in your head is to call it memoir. That somehow makes it Cult of Personality, which Americans are apparently complete suckers for.

So - who to smack?

Here's the thing. I'm a novelist. I write fiction. My PR stuff makes that very clear. It's especially true of the current series, my "midlife crisis reclaim some of my own history" books, the Kinkaids: they are simply not memoirs. Hell, they aren't even roman a clef category.

Fiction, people. Fiction, fiction, fiction.

Do they incorporate incidents from my own life? Of course they do. That's true of everything I've written. Is JP Kinkaid a real person? No. His voice was very much the voice of someone I knew and loved dearly, but they think differently, they react differently, they even look differently. When I close my eyes and think John Peter Kinkaid, the man I see in my mind's eye is not the man I knew.

Fiction. Say it as often as is needed: fiction.

If I were laying blame for the rash of fake memoirs out there, I'd be laying it first and foremost (and most heavily) on publishing. You guys like to say you're simply reacting to market demand. That's bollocks. You're creating the damned market, and you're the ones pushing the Cult of Personality crap. Spread your attention around a little bit, level your playing field, start worrying about (dare I say it?) good reads, instead of the author's personality status. You might be surprised. I sure as hell would be.

So, saying it loud and proud: don't expect to see me on Oprah, claiming the Kinkaids are fact. They're not.

They are, however, really, REALLY good fiction.