I once knew a pathological liar. She appeared at my doorstep, crying, the night she was fired unjustly from her job for stealing. She told me many warm stories about her mother, who took her to Indigo Girls concerts and gave her carefully selected gifts every time they met, like a leather-bound journal and brown velvet pants.
At some point I put together that my friend was a thief with a spotty job record. She had been abandoned by her mother as a small child. The stories she told served some kind of mysterious psychological purpose. If she could convince me of them, maybe they were true.
Authors who lie are an ignominious bunch. Claiming fiction as the truth is a mortal sin. Curiously, when Patti Davis or Nora Ephron thinly veil their domestic grievances in a roman a clef, passing off memoir as fiction, the criticism is comparatively benign. But lying about your autobiography is not OK.
Here are some infamous examples of authors who were also pathological liars.
- It’s hard to imagine now, but in the mid-aughts James Frey was a literary sensation. Lindsay Lohan never left home without a copy of his book. Oprah teared up on air talking about how moved she was by his harrowing battle with addiction. He told of long stints in jail, reading the classics aloud to his illiterate buddy. His troubles, he claimed, were rooted in a train crash in his hometown, in which two young women were killed.
As he reached the peak of literary fame, an investigative journalist blew open the real story: while Frey was an addict in recovery, much of his story was fabricated. While two young women had been killed in a trainwreck in his hometown, he was not present as he had claimed. While he had been in jail, it was short-term. Leonard, the illiterate friend, was fictional.
2. Few fiction writers achieve the level of fame that Jeremiah Terminator LeRoy did in the 1990s. Everyone from Madonna to Courtney Love glommed onto the transgender son of a truck-stop sex worker who wrote beautiful stories about his rough life. When fame reached its apex, there was a high demand for media appearances. A laconic person in a blond wig showed up, always accompanied by an assistant.
For six years, JT LeRoy made appearances with his assistant. Eventually, though, people realized that he was basically a hoax, a performance piece put together by writer Laura Albert. When Albert’s fiction was in high demand, she asked her then sister-in-law to don a wig and play a role. JT LeRoy was not real.
3. The most recent inductee to the Literary Hall of Shame is AJ Finn. A literary sensation when The Woman in the Window was released in 2018, he achieved a level of success few authors do. In the midst of his glory, though, media reports exposed him as a compulsive liar. He had claimed that he lost his mother to cancer and a brother to suicide. In fact, both were still alive. His stories of surviving a brain tumor were fabricated. When exposed, Finn claimed that he was bipolar and that his mental illness sometimes caused delusions.
A psychologist could weigh in with an analysis of the role mental health might have played in any of these circumstances. As it stands, though, they are infamous. And I haven’t spoken to my friend in years.
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