A fake memoir is a book that was published with the assertion that the events depicted are substantially true, but are later discovered or strongly asserted to be false: a book does not have to be entirely fictional to be considered a fake memoir. In contrast, a book which openly acknowledges that its author has fictionalized elements while still drawing on their own life may be more properly considered an autobiographical novel.
Entries are organized by the original publication date of the work in question.
19th century
Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk: as Exhibited in a Narrative of Her Sufferings During a Residence of Five Years as a Novice, and Two Years as a Black Nun, in the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery at Montreal, Howe & Bates, New York (1836), is a wildly sensationalistic story of life in a Montreal convent where nuns were forced to have sex with the priests in the seminary next door. Monk's descriptions of events have been found inconsistent with her physical surroundings, leading to assertions that it may have been a hoax perpetrated by her publisher or ghostwriters.Stein, Gordon. (1993). Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Gale Group. pp. 224-226. New York Herald, 1836-08-12, p.2, col. 1; The Colophon, pt. 17, 1934. Davy Crockett, Col. Crockett's exploits and adventures in Texas: wherein is contained a full account of his journey from Tennessee to the Red River and Natchitoches, and thence across Texas to San Antonio; including many hair-breadth escapes; together with a topographical, historical, and political view of Texas ... Written by Himself, T.K. and P.G. Collins, Philadelphia (1836), was supposedly Crockett’s journal taken at the Alamo by Mexican General Castrillón and then recovered at the Battle of San Jacinto, but was in fact written by Richard Penn Smith and Charles T. Beale.Howes, US-IANA, S654 The work has been called an "ingenious pseudo-autobiography."Richard R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo : Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol, Univ. of Texas (2002), p. 139.
1901–1950 Philip Aegidius Walshe (actually Montgomery Carmichael), The Life of John William Walshe, F.S.A., London, Burns & Oates, (1901); New York, E. P. Dutton (1902). This book was presented as a son’s story of his father’s life in Italy as “a profound mystic and student of everything relating to St. Francis of Assisi,” but the son, the father and the memoir were all invented by Montgomery Carmichael.(1 September 1906). Saturday Review of Books, p. BR537. Edmund Backhouse, China Under the Empress Dowager: being the History of the Life and Times of Tzu Hsi, Compiled from State Papers and the Private Diary of the Comptroller of her Household, London, Heinemann; Philadelphia, J. B. Lippincott & Co. (1910). The diary (Diary of His Excellency Ching Shan) on which the book was based was proven in 1976 to have been forged by Backhouse.Trevor-Roper, Hugh The Hermit of Peking, New York: Alfred Knopf, 1976 pages 348-352.Duyvendak, The Diary of His Excellency Ching-Shan: Being a Chinese Account of the Boxer Troubles (Leiden: Brill, 1924; rpr. Arlington, Va.: University Publications of America, 1976; ); Hui-min Lo, "The Ching-shan Diary: A Clue to its Forgery," East Asian History, 1 (1991), 98–124 Abel Fosdyk (likely A. Howard Linford), the Abel Fosdyk papers, published in The Strand Magazine, 1913. The papers presented a story, in diary form, of the mystery of the abandoned Mary Celeste, and had been written by a supposed passenger. In 1924, J.G. Lockhart's Mysteries of the Sea highlighted a number of discrepancies in the papers; Lockhart concluded that the papers had been forged by Linford. William Francis Mannix, The Memoirs of Li Hung Chang (1913). The memoirs on which the book were based, seemingly having been written by Li Hongzhang and edited by Mannix, were revealed in 1923 to have been forged by Mannix. - Cited: p. 19. Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance (actually Sylvester Clark Long), Long Lance, Cosmopolitan Book Company (1928). The book presented Lance as having been born the son of a Blackfoot chief in Montana's Sweetgrass Hills, to have been wounded eight times in World War I, and promoted to the rank of captain. In fact, the story was fabricated: Lance was an African-American born in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.Donald B. Smith, Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Impersonator, Red Deer Press, 1999, pp.243-244 Joan Lowell, Cradle of the Deep, Simon & Schuster (1929). The book presented the story of Lowell as a girl who, before she was even a year old, was taken away from her ailing mother by her sea captain father to live on the Minnie A. Caine, a trading ship, and that she had lived on the ship with its all-male crew until she was 17, when the ship burned and sank off the coast of Australia as Lowell swam three miles to safety with a family of kittens clinging by their claws to her back. In fact, Lowell had been on the ship, which remained safe in California, for only 15 months. The book was a sensational best seller until its events were exposed as fiction. John Knyveton (actually Ernest Gray), The Diary of a Surgeon in the Year 1751-1752, edited and transcribed by Ernest Gray, New York, D. Appleton-Century (1938); Surgeon's Mate: the diary of John Knyveton, surgeon in the British fleet during the Seven Years' War 1756-1762, edited and transcribed by Ernest Gray, London, Robert Hale (1942); and Man midwife; the further experiences of John Knyveton, M.D., late surgeon in the British fleet, during the years 1763-1809, edited and transcribed by Ernest Gray, London, Robert Hale (1946). The three medical diaries were well received when published, but doubts were later raised about their authenticity: they were proven in 2014 to have been forged by Gray, being loosely based on a short biography of Dr Thomas Denman.Evans, Martin H. & Hooper, Geoffrey: "Three misleading diaries: John Knyveton MD - from naval surgeon's mate to man-midwife." International Journal of Maritime History (2014) 26: 762-788.Hooper, Geoffrey: BMJ, 344:e3019 (2012) Eugene L. Rasor, English/British Naval History to 1815: A Guide to the Literature (2004) p. 226.
1951–2000 Friedrich Nietzsche, My Sister and I (1951) was supposedly written in 1889 or early 1890 during Nietzsche's stay in a mental asylum. It makes several bold and otherwise unreported claims, most notably of an incestuous relationship between Nietzsche and his sister. Louis Le Golif, Cahiers de Louis Adhemar Timothée Le Golif, dit Borgnefesse, capitaine de la flibuste (1952), translated into English as The Memoirs of a Buccaneer: Being a Wondrous and Unrepentant Account of the Prodigious Adventures and Amours of King Louis XIV’s Loyal Servant, Louis Adhemar Timothée Le Golif, Known for His Singular Wound As Borgnefesse, Captain of the Buccaneers, Told by Himself (1954), was presented as the long-lost manuscript of a 17th century French sea captain involved in pirate activities in the Caribbean. It was disregarded by most academics immediately, and is now considered an entertaining work of maritime fiction. Slavomir Rawicz, The Long Walk (originally published 1955) is a ghostwritten book in which Rawicz, who was a Polish Army lieutenant imprisoned by the NKVD after the German-Soviet invasion of Poland, claimed to have escaped in 1941 from a Siberian Gulag camp and traveled approximately 6,500 km on foot through the Gobi Desert, Tibet, and the Himalayas to reach British India. In 2006, the BBC released evidence showing that Rawicz had not escaped, but in fact had been released and transported to Iran. Another Polish WWII veteran, Witold Gliński, has since claimed that he, not Rawicz, was the person who actually made "the long walk". Carlos Castaneda wrote a series of books that describe his training in traditional Mesoamerican shamanism, starting with The Teachings of Don Juan, University of California Press (1968). His 12 books have sold more than eight million copies in 17 languages, but scholars of the Yaqui ethnic group have disputed the veracity of his publications. Anonymous (actually Beatrice Sparks), Go Ask Alice, Prentice-Hall (1971), was originally presented as being the real diary of an anonymous teenage girl who died of a drug overdose in the late 1960s. Sparks later became known for producing several additional books purporting to be the "real diaries" of troubled teenagers. Before the book's authenticity was challenged, The New York Times praised it as an "extraordinary work for teenagers" and "a document of horrifying reality and literary quality". It was later reclassified by its publishers as fiction. Clifford Irving, The Autobiography of Howard Hughes, McGraw-Hill (1972), was a forged autobiography of the reclusive billionaire. Irving served 17 months in prison after confessing to the hoax. Forrest Carter (pseud. Asa Earl Carter), The Education of Little Tree, Delacorte Press (1976), was presented as the author's memoir about growing up among the Cherokee, but is in fact fiction written by a former white supremacist. David Rorvik, In his Image: the Cloning of a Man, J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia and New York (1978), The author (Rorvik) intentionally left the word "his" uncapitalized in the title of this book. See Talk:David Rorvik in which he claimed to have been part of a successful endeavor to create a clone of a human being. In a subsequent defamation suit, a court found the book was a hoax; while the publisher subsequently acknowledged this, Rorvik continues to maintain it is truthful. Cleo Birdwell (pseud. Don DeLillo), Amazons (1980), a forged memoir of the first woman to play in the National Hockey League, which DeLillo notoriously refused to acknowledge authorship of for 40 years. Michelle Remembers (1980) was presented as the true account of Michelle Smith's recovered memories of childhood Satanic ritual abuse, recorded with her psychiatrist, Lawrence Pazder. The book became highly influential, helping to fuel the Satanic Panic of the 1980s. Investigators, journalists, and scholars found no credible evidence supporting its claims, and numerous inconsistencies undermined its credibility. It is widely regarded as a fabricated memoir that exemplifies the dangers of recovered-memory narratives and moral panic.https://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/this-book-plunged-the-world-into-a-terrifying-obsession-with-satanic-cults-in-the-1980s-1.7031992 Konrad Kujau forged The Hitler Diaries in 1983. When first published in the Sunday Times, the diaries were authenticated by the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, but they were demonstrated to be crude fakes, written on modern paper, within a few weeks. Lauren Stratford (pseud. Laurel Rose Willson), Satan's Underground, Harvest House, Oregon (1988), purporting to tell a true story of her upbringing in a Satanic cult, but it was later deemed to be fabricated. She subsequently assumed the guise of a Holocaust survivor under the alias of Laura Grabowski, which was also revealed to be false. Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under, MM Co. (self-published), Lees Summit, Missouri (1991); HarperCollins, New York (1994). The book claimed to be a memoir of her time spent with Aboriginals, but has caused protests by Aboriginal groups. Parts of it have been asserted to be invented, and the publisher has reissued it labeled as fiction. Anthony Godby Johnson, A Rock and a Hard Place: One Boy's Triumphant Story, Crown Books, New York; Little Brown, London (1993), is the story of a young boy, sexually abused by his parents and later adopted, who discovers he is HIV-positive and who develops AIDS. This book has been challenged on a number of accounts, and is alleged to be the fictional product of Vicki Johnson, also known as Vicki Fraginals Zackheim. "Tony," the subject of the book, made an "appearance" on the Oprah Winfrey Show, but was interviewed with his face obscured.