Western Book Roundup
Cormac takes Paris, Made-Up Memoirs, and Krakauer News
By Jenny Shank, 3-26-08
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I was in France this month, and went the big FNAC (kind of like a Tower Records and Barnes & Noble combined) in Paris to check out what American writers are popular there. The only Western American book that I saw featured prominently this time was Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which is called La Route. It somehow doesn’t seem right to call that book “La” anything. The film No Country for Old Men was playing at several movie theaters in central Paris, and they left that title un-translated. Probably because the English version is catchier than “Ce n’est aucun pays pour de vieux hommes.”
I was out of town for a few weeks, and came back to learn of yet another fake memoir scandal. You’ve probably heard all about this by now, but it involves a regional writer, so I feel obliged to mention it: Eugene, Oregon resident Margaret Seltzer made headlines a few weeks ago when her “memoir,” Love and Consequences, published by Riverhead Books under the name Margaret B. Jones, was yanked from stores after everyone figured out that it was entirely fabricated.
According to Mokoto Rich of the New York Times, Jones wrote in the book about “her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. In reality, she’s all white, comes from an affluent family, and was never a foster child or a member of a gang.”
As long as memoirs remain more popular with readers and easier to sell to publishers than novels, there will probably continue to be revelations like this one. Here’s a question for you to discuss among yourselves: If you could write a fake memoir, what sort of fake life would you create? I wouldn’t be a gangbanger, drug addict, or holocaust survivor, as three recently deposed memoirists have claimed to be. I’d be something a little more fun: maybe a cowgirl.
On a happier note, Migration Patterns by Colorado writer Gary Schanbacher received an honorable mention this month for the 2008 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award (which was won by Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End). The award honors “a distinguished first book of fiction.” Check out our review of Schanbacher’s fine book here.
Patti Thorn of the Rocky Mountain News recently reported on Boulder resident Jon Krakauer‘s new book deal. He’s going to write about NFL star and slain war hero, Pat Tillman.
Thorn also recently wrote a very kind article about my novel, which, as I mentioned last month, was a semi-finalist for the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award. I didn’t make it to the finals—voting for the top 10 continues here through the end of the month. But I did get Thorn’s great article out of it, and it’s now prominently featured on my parents’ refrigerator. Under the pictures of the grandkids, of course.
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-Mark