Blowing the Whistle on Fakers

Hey! I'm still alive!

I finished my draft of my book, and now am tackling a pretty significant revision. All my brain cells seem to be on the book. But I did read the newspaper this morning and saw this:

'American dream' memoir exposed as fake

It seems this woman wrote a book claiming she was:

...a mixed-race girl who had been abused as a child and brought up by foster parents in gritty south-central Los Angeles. She claimed to have kept herself alive by running drugs for local gangs.

But it turns out that:

She was not brought up in south-central LA but in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks suburb.

And, far from running drugs to keep herself going and talking the language of the street, she went to private school

Add to this two other well publicized cases of "faking it" a Holocaust memoir written by Misha Defonseca and James Frey's memoir: A Million Little Pieces.

So what's the deal? Should we be shocked that people will lie to achieve money and fame? Probably not.

In my local newspaper, I read that it was Margaret Seltzer's sister who blew the whistle on her. Good for the sister! I think the good news in this is that the truth does have a way of coming out.

So what would you do? If you knew someone was lying so blatantly, would you expose them? I think I would in most cases.