Books March 2010
Bad confessions
A review of Ben Yagoda’s Memoir: A History.
Ben Yagoda -->reviewed by Stefan Beck -->
Though Kingsley Amis’s novel Difficulties with Girls was published in 1988, it contains a passage that might as well have been cocked at the “fake memoir” epidemic of the decade just concluded. Amis’s hero, Patrick Standish, who works for a British publishing house, has been asked his opinion of a manuscript bearing the portentous title Blood in the Tigris:
“I have to say bluntly at the outset that I found this book something of a disappointment after Dreamtime Children of Ayers Rock” (outdid even that hotchpotch of illiterate fabrication)… . “Now nobody’s asking for strict historical truth” (more than a faint concern for probability) “but here and there” (throughout)...
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