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WITHIN STRIKING DISTANCE

The lived experience of giving and granting trust is a precondition for mutuality, or in a more abstracted, politicized rendition: solidarity. There are lots of other places to encounter this kind of mutuality, say doing work with others, but sports are one highly accessible and joyful route. Trust is necessarily bound up with the possibility of suffering, and in an antiseptic and duplicitous era, that’s an attractive commodity to many—ergo the phenomenon of fake memoirs. James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces is the flag-bearer for this genre—but there is a boatload of these clowns. Frey is a rich-kid frat boy who claimed a life of unbelievable drug and alcohol abuse, violence, Mafia relationships, and general chaos so extreme that it turned his “memoir” into a critically-lauded bestseller. Pretty much none of it was true and he got famously flogged for it.

But he is hardly alone. Over the course of multiple celebrated Oprah appearances, and in a book intended for publication in 2009 (but cancelled), Herman Rosenblat claimed that he met his wife through the fence at Buchenwald. He actually is a concentration camp survivor, but his love story and many details of his book are fantasy. In 2008, Margaret Seltzer, a rich, white suburban girl pawned off Love and Consequences, a memoir of growing up as a half-white and half-Native foster child, living a bad-ass life of drugs and violence as a Blood gang member. She even faked a thug accent in radio interviews, until she was exposed and the book pulled.