Latest news with #literaryfraud
ABC News
22-07-2025
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Dominic Amerena writes about a literary fraudster in his debut novel, I Want Everything
Since the Ern Malley affair of the 1940s — where two poets pretended to be a recently deceased mechanic who penned a sheaf of modernist poems — Australia has produced an array of literary fraudsters. Notorious examples include Norma Khouri, Helen Demidenko and John Hughes, who was revealed to have plagiarised extensively from the work of others in his 2022 novel The Dogs. "Once you start looking back across Australian literary history, you see it's littered with notable scandals and hoaxes," author Dominic Amerena tells ABC Radio National's The Book Show. He believes "there's something very Australian" about this pattern of fakery, borne from a sense of unbelonging that comes from living on colonised land. "These writers are expressing an instability in settler identity," he says. Amerena draws on this rich history in his debut novel, I Want Everything, the tale of a modern-day literary heist set in Melbourne's western suburbs. I Want Everything's unnamed narrator is an unpublished author who nevertheless dreams of writing a great Australian novel. But there's a problem: he lacks the discipline or creativity necessary to become a serious novelist. "We know that he is roiling with ambition and that he has no talent and no stories of his own to tell," Beejay Silcox tells ABC Radio National's The Bookshelf. Instead, he has lived a life of "noble precarity" for a decade, funded by submitting himself to paid medical trials. He exists in the shadow of his talented girlfriend Ruth, a "Melbourne-famous" writer whose essay mining her problematic relationship with her mother goes viral. "[He] has this idea that greatness can be something that is almost stolen from other writers," Amerena tells The Book Show. "He has an extractive view of talent and how to tell stories." But, in an apparent stroke of good luck, he encounters a woman at a local aquarobics class who is "maddeningly familiar". Eventually he puts a name to the face: Brenda Shales, a cult 70s author who disappeared from public view after publishing two wildly successful and controversial novels. Reeling from the realisation he has unwittingly stumbled across Australia's most notorious living literary recluse at the local pool, he tracks her down to a nursing home in Yarraville in Melbourne's western suburbs, hoping she will somehow revive his anaemic literary career. "The nurse who's bringing him to her room introduces him as her grandson, and, strangely, Brenda Shales doesn't seem to correct the nurse's mistake. In fact, she seems to recognise him as a long-lost relative," Amerena says. This subterfuge — framed by the narrator in the novel's opening line as "an innocent mistake" — drives the narrative. Although he's beset by guilt at his actions, the narrator fails to reveal the truth to Shales at crucial points in the narrative. "The novel is about the self-deceptions that we tell ourselves to permit ourselves to do unconscionable things," Amerena says. The Shales character — spiky and quick-witted with a "grim hyphen of a mouth" — is an amalgam of some of Australia's greatest women writers. Amerena used Helen Garner's three-volume diaries as a guide when developing the "cadence" of Shales's voice, which made for an interesting encounter when he met the revered writer at the Sydney Writers' Festival. Heart in mouth, he told Garner she'd been a great influence on a central character in his novel. "And she said, 'Well, I bet she's a real bitch, isn't she?'" he says. "It was so perfectly Helen Garner and so perfectly Brenda Shales as well. It was very fitting." Another source of inspiration was Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Well, a "strange psychosexual gothic story", which won the Miles Franklin in 1986. The book explores the relationship between two women — one older than the other — who live together on a farm in the country. The story takes a macabre turn when they hit something, or someone, in their car and dispose of the body in the nearby well. "It's a very strange, opaque text which can be read in many, many different ways," Amerena says. He relished using these points of reference to fashion Shales and her fictitious literary works. I Want Everything is also concerned with the ethics of storytelling. "Writers are always coming up against these ethical considerations [about] what parts of other people's lives are fair game to use, what parts of your own lives are fair game [and] who owns a story," Amerena says. "These are questions that I don't think have a clear answer, but [they're questions] my novel is trying to explore." Amerena says he tried to avoid autobiography in his novel, using instead "small snippets of the world". But he soon discovered how difficult it can be to discern memory from make-believe. "I come from an Italian background, and I have this distinct memory of my grandfather telling me about his father, who'd been interred in a labour camp during World War II, which is what happened to a lot of Italian immigrants. It stuck in my mind for a few years … and it ended up in my book in a very, very small way. "Eventually I came back to my family to get the full story, and they were very confused. They were like, 'What are you talking about?' I somehow completely made it up." The episode was instructive. "It taught me that the boundary between fiction and life is more porous than I'm often conscious of," he says. While I Want Everything is a work of fiction, Amerena and his narrator share some common traits. At a recent literary event, an old schoolmate reminded him how, after reading Les Misérables as a 14-year-old, he, too, announced his intention to write the next great Australian novel. While Amerena laughs at the anecdote now, he says ambition can be a "dirty word" in our literary culture. "Artists have to pretend that they're not ambitious; they pretend the work flows out of them. It's a struggle Amerena knows firsthand. He rewrote a prize-winning but unworkable manuscript to produce I Want Everything, discarding several storylines in the process. "Part of writing this book … has been getting in touch with my own ambition and feeling comfortable with saying that I am proud of this book and … I'm happy people are reading it," he says. I Want Everything is published by Summit Books (Simon & Schuster).
Times
07-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Salt Path scandal: the juiciest literary scams, from James Frey to JT LeRoy
Ever feel like you've been had? Readers of Raynor Winn's bestseller The Salt Path are smarting after the author was accused at the weekend of weaving a tissue of whoppers into her story. This redemptive, heart-warming memoir about Winn and her husband, Moth, is facing allegations that lots of it was made up — including the couple's names. People expect memoirs to be truthful, especially when they carry a big emotional payload — and even though we all know there's no such thing as the whole truth. But some literary fraudsters are more notorious than others. Here are some of the worst — and the best. If literary history has taught writers one thing, it's don't mess with Oprah Winfrey. Frey wrote a sentimental memoir, A Million Little Pieces (2003), about his (real) drug addiction, which turned out to be extravagantly exaggerated in every direction. Maybe we should have been alerted by the fact that he says in the book 'lying became part of my life'. Winfrey, who had chosen his memoir for her book club, was not happy. 'You betrayed millions of readers,' she scolded him on TV. In those more innocent times the deception was headline news and Frey was contrite, at least to begin with. But you can't keep a rascal down and Frey continued to publish books, even if there was no evidence he could actually write. 'Remarkably boring … the language is dead,' said our chief literary critic of Frey's latest bomb. Frey also set up a 'fiction factory' to help other writers to churn out commercial children's fiction and these days takes a high-minded view of his earlier fraud. 'When Picasso makes a self-portrait, if it's not photorealist, is it valid?' he asks. Well, in an age where fake news is not just accepted but cheerfully promulgated by some of the most powerful men in the world, perhaps Frey was just ahead of his rating: 10/10. The guv'nor. Utterly shameless. Somebody stop him! Early in the 21st century two slim volumes of fiction appeared — a novel, Sarah, and collection of stories, The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things — which purported to be autobiographical tales featuring all the lip-smacking stuff of misery memoirs: abuse, prostitution, abduction, the lot. They were lapped up by readers and critics, and the author JT LeRoy — a former rent boy and drug addict — became a cult figure, even writing for this newspaper. However, LeRoy was publicity shy and only appeared in public disguised with sunglasses and a blond fright wig that made Andy Warhol's look understated. Under the wig, it turned out, was the younger sister-in-law of the real author of LeRoy's books: the American author Laura Albert, who rightly surmised that a transgressive teen would get more attention than a middle-aged woman. Initially she tried to argue that JT LeRoy was a character living inside her but the game was up. We could give Albert credit for stopping when the deceit was discovered but the work was so closely linked to the persona that a Frey-like renaissance was never rating: 8/10. Almost a work of performance art. Sneaking admiration. • I'm devastated by the Salt Path 'lies'. It meant so much to me In 1943 an Australian literary magazine thought it had discovered a previously unknown modernist master of poetry. Poems by the late Ern Malley were sent to them by his sister Ethel, who'd been clearing out after his death. The poems were … intense, full of meaningless phrases like 'my omphagic ear' and 'the black swan of trespass' that, if it were done today, you'd assume were the output of ChatGPT after too much coffee. Some of the verse was obviously a joke ('he/ who has caparisoned a nun dies/ with his Twankydillo at the ready') but the mag lapped it up. Later the editors were fined for publishing obscene material, which implies that someone actually understood what the poems meant. But as the critic Robert Hughes pointed out, 'Ern Malley was not dead, for he had never lived'. His poems had all been written in an afternoon by two young army men, Harold Stewart and James McAuley. The only people happier than the editors who discovered Ern Malley were the editors who discovered the rating: 7/10. So obviously nonsense yet they got away with it — for a while. Who wouldn't love to see a private letter from a famous wit like Dorothy Parker or Noël Coward? For a while in the 1990s, the American biographer Lee Israel made it possible: she forged letters from writers, giving people a bit of juice (Coward, in one, complained about Julie Andrews's teeth), then sold them to memorabilia dealers — more than 400 times. Like JT LeRoy's creator, Israel was a frustrated writer and figured out a way to get people to actually read what she wrote. The problem was that if people took it seriously when they were duped by a book, it became really personal when they were fooled by a fake letter. Israel was unrepentant: the fake letters were 'larky and fun and totally cool'. The courts disagreed: Israel was prosecuted for the money she fraudulently made from the sale of the letters, and narrowly escaped prison. Where anyone else might have laid low and adopted a new career in underwater basket-weaving, Israel instead 'did a Frey' and published a rebarbative, entirely unapologetic memoir about the affair in 2008, which became a hit film, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, starring Melissa McCarthy. Which shows that if there's one thing that unites such fraudsters, it's not knowing when to stop. (The correct answer is 'just before you start'.)Pinocchio rating: 6/10. Credit given for sheer energy and range. Gore Vidal called it 'a moving account of an artist too well understood by his time'. For David Bowie it was a 'quiet and moving monograph'. In 1998 William Boyd's illustrated biography of the rediscovered New York artist Nat Tate, launched at Jeff Koons's studio on April 1, was a sensation — and it was all a big fib. Vidal and Bowie were in on the joke. Boyd, who likes nothing better than creating a whole life from nothing, invented an artist, wrote his biography, stuffed the book with plausible photos and even sold one of Tate's paintings at auction — to Anthony McPartlin from Ant and Dec. (The proceeds went to charity.) And Boyd fans may recognise one of Nat Tate's friends, whose photograph appears in the book: it is the legendary Logan Mountstuart, who would go on to star in Boyd's next novel, Any Human rating: 2/10. Not so much a scam as a brilliant benevolent wheeze. • Read more book reviews and interviews — and see what's top of the Sunday Times Bestsellers List The actor David Niven is loved as much now for his series of memoirs as for his films. The books, starting with The Moon's a Balloon, are so full of perfect anecdotes that, as our reviewer put it, 'the stories are too perfect, too rounded, not to have been seriously embellished' — and documents released in 2002 put into question Niven's army career as presented in his book. But his reputation is undimmed, probably because these things matter less when the writing is so good and when the story tells us some deeper truth. The same goes for the Polish travel writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, who, as Neal Ascherson put it, 'was capable of inventing to make the truth even truer'. We tend to forgive these writers, just as Clive James did when he discovered that his beloved Italian essayist Eugenio Montale had got assistants to write many of his book reviews and split the payment. James was unperturbed: all he had discovered, he wrote, 'was that the demigod was a human being all along'.Pinocchio rating: 0/10. We forgive genius anything.
