Well, gosh. Apparently, someone in the US has published a memoir that wasn’t entirely true. Astounding. Who’d have thought it? Even Oprah was taken in by it. Now there’s a lot of soul-searching going on in the book publishing industry. But apparently, in the US, publishers’ margins are so small, they can’t afford fact checkers, unlike on the magazines.
It’s a different world, isn’t it? ‘Fact checkers’ on magazines? It’s an entertaining concept to most British journalists. In the UK, we rely on the sub-editors to check facts. But it’s a rare sub indeed who actually does this (and an even rarer sub who’s given the time to do it). Certainly, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who have checked the facts in my articles over the years. I actually need far more fingers to count the number of incorrect facts that various subs have added.
But fact-checking in the book world? Whoever heard of that? Surely that takes the fun out of half of them? Would Piers Morgan’s ‘memoirs’ have been half as entertaining if they’d been true or if you hadn’t known before reading them they’d they be a bunch of porkies? Sure, you don’t want a maths textbook to be making stuff up, but most books – even the non-fiction ones – are supposed to be partial and subjective. I, for one, doubt there’s ever been an autobiography that’s been entirely truthful. Doesn’t everyone know this already? So why the mock shock?
Still, some guy is suing the publishers of this particular book for $50 million, he’s so appalled that the book wasn’t non-fiction as claimed. You can see why US publishers might get alarmed about this kind of thing.
I don’t know what will happen if this particularly litigious naif ever sees Fargo, but it won’t be pretty. And if he ever gets started on ‘Dr’ Gillian McKeith’s output…