I recently had an emotionally jarring experience by reading a memoir (yes, I get pretty into books, so this is possible). The book itself was fantastic. It was written by a young woman who was raised in the foster child system in California. A string of foster parents eventually led her to a placement in South Central Los Angeles – the center of gang activity in LA. Her foster home was smack in the middle of Blood territory. The woman grew up with guns and drugs and murders and poverty and hopelessness. She had two foster brothers who ended up in jail, one of her best friends was gunned down on the street, and she was forced to care for two younger foster sisters with nothing but food stamps and her own wits.
I really love books. I plowed through this one in about two days, feeling very satisfied with the ending (the young woman managed to escape the neighborhood, went to college, and started working with an organization to end gang violence). I closed the book, breathed a mental “Ahhhhh” at the satisfaction I’d received from reading it, and then reached for Google. I wanted to look the author up, see if she had a blog, and find out more about what she’d been up to in the past year or so since the book was published.
I Googled her name and immediately found a string of articles about her:
Author Admits “Gang-Life” Memoir was All Fiction
Gang Memoir, Turning Page, is Pure Fiction
Memoir “Love and Consequences” Revealed as Fiction
I was absolutely stunned. This was a fantastic story – well told, great characters, completelely believable as far as I was concerned. Granted, I grew up with cornfields in my backyard, not crackhouses, so what did I know? Nonetheless, I sat there, completely bummed and feeling betrayed by the author I’d just followed through her meaningful, powerful “journey”. How could she?
But what it made me think about was the fact that the truth eventually does come to light. This author was about to start her book tour when HER OWN SISTER called the publisher and let them know the whole thing was made up. Someone will always know the truth, and it does catch up to you.
So when you’re writing blog posts, make sure you’re being authentic. If you’re a company, don’t write a fake blog authored by a gung-ho Walmart family that is meant strictly as a promotional tool.
If you’re an individual, don’t write as if you’re the prime minister of India, like this guy. Yes, I realize this a pardody. It still bugs me.
Either way – if you’re a business or an individual, follow common sense. Check your facts. Be yourself. For heaven’s sake, don’t lie consciously. When you find errors after you’ve already published something, print a correction (and an apology, if it’s appropriate).
In the blog world, as in the print world, you won’t be able to get away with being inauthentic for long. Someone will find you out and shut you down. And there will be a disappointed reader, sitting in her living room, looking unhappily at Google results that leave her feeling foolish and sad.
Great post… authenticity is tricky in art. I have a lot of trouble with songwriting because I’m trying to be authentic, and write what I know and am passionate about. But seriously, who wants to hear songs about physics, software development management, and the NFL?
Hmm… then again, Fountains of Wayne seems to have quite a following.
Great advice, Beth. Readers feel ripped off if the content is not true–if a writer says it happened this way when it didn’t. Even fiction needs to be “true” in this sense. The late John Updike said that his job as a writer was to “clarify people’s lives for them,” or words to that effect (in a Fresh Air interview). Inauthentic content doesn’t perform that service because it’s intended only to serve the writer. Bad move.