IN MY earliest childhood memory, I am staring up into the furry visage of a llama. And I cry out: "Daddy!"
As a toddler, you see, I was taken in by a herd of these South American mammals, after my parents vanished during a mysterious blanket-weaving accident. My adoptive llama family was kind but rough-hewn. After being spat upon one time too many, I set out at age 6 in search of my biological relatives. I wandered across the Andes barefoot, and survived for years on the pampas by eating only prairie grass. Eventually, I made my way to America, to the unforgiving streets of Providence, where I joined a gang and sold fake hallucinogens to credulous street mimes.
That, at least, is the deeper truth of my life.
Some minor literal details may vary a wee bit: For starters, I grew up uneventfully in the Rhode Island suburb where my parents still live. But what are mere facts, now that the bounds of memoirs have been stretched so far? As author Misha Defonseca said in a statement about her recently discredited 1997 memoir, "There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world. The story in the book is mine. It is not the actual reality - it was my reality, my way of surviving."
In "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," Defonseca claims to have evaded the Nazis, wandered alone from her native Belgium as far away as Ukraine, and lived with wolves. The irony is that she had a real family story to tell. Her parents, it seems, were executed as members of the Belgian resistance.
In postwar America, though, the hardships that build character and make good stories have been engineered away, at least for much of the middle class. But by gussying up a memoir, even nerdy kids get to imagine life on the edge. Thus, the author of the new memoir "Love and Consequences" turns out to be not Margaret B. Jones, foster-child-turned-gang-member, but Margaret Seltzer, graduate of a private school and habitué of creative-writing classes. When a website exposed falsehoods two years ago in author James Frey's memoir of addiction, crime, and redemption, his actual rap sheet was barely more extensive than, oh, mine.
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But rarely, if ever, have writers from respectable origins had such incentives to pose as dissolute - or, in Defonseca's case, as if raised by wolves. Jay Gatsby changed his name to hide his humble origins. He's gone, replaced by the literary equivalent of faux bedhead hairdos and pre-ripped jeans.
DANTE RAMOS
