Making Up The Truth

SPEAKING VOLUMES

It was an incredible true story. Misha Defonseca was seven when her parents, Jewish Belgian resistance members, were arrested by the Nazis during World War II. Misha set off to find her parents. Over the next five years, she walked roughly 3,000 miles; she visited the infamous Warsaw Ghetto, was adopted by a pack of wolves who guided her through her journey, and killed a German soldier who was bent on raping her.

If this sounds fantastical, that's because it was. Misha Defonseca wrote her memoir of Surviving With Wolves in 1997. It took a decade to expose her many lies: Misha Defonseca was really Monique de Wael. She was not Jewish. The years she claimed she had spent at wolf camp 101 were years spent with her grandmother in a flat in Brussels. She does like dogs, and wolves. Her parents, while not being Jewish, were members of the Belgian resistance movement, and they disappeared when she was four.

The revelation of Defonseca/de Wael's lies happened this week "" a full decade after her bestselling memoir Misha: Surviving With Wolves was published. Her memoir has sold millions of copies. There have been murmurs about the veracity of the story right from the start, but Misha's memoir has inspired a film, an opera version, and taken in thousands of readers, publishers, agents, and the like. How did this happen?

You could argue that Jane Daniel, the independent publisher who shaped and published Misha's memoir, is culpable. But if Daniel pulled together a respectable hoax, you have to ask yourself why the reviewers and the public swallowed Misha's story and had the book selling in the millions. "This story is about a young Jewish girl whose parents die in the Holocaust...and then she gets into the Warsaw Ghetto and incredibly, escapes... and then she's adopted by a pack of wolves and travels 3,000 miles at the age of seven..." I'm sorry, but if alarm bells aren't going off at this synopsis, there is something seriously wrong with your radar.

I have some sympathy for Misha's editor. She provided pictures of herself with wolves. She had spoken, movingly, of her travails among the Jewish community. And, let's face it, this was a great story.

What interests me is not the question of whether Misha fabricated her life or didn't: it's the question of why we, as readers, remain so fascinated by the memoir, with its increasingly dubious promise of truth. James Frey, author of the bestselling A Million Little Pieces, was one of the more prominent writers in recent times to demonstrate both the compelling grip of the memoir, and the fears that rise up when you realise that the memoirist is, in effect, a writer of fiction. He wrote a bestseller composed of best-selling, Oprah-endorsed lies. When the truth came out, it didn't affect sales by much.

"Misha" had another, equally compelling truth that she might have shared with us. Her parents were Belgian resistance fighters, who tackled the Nazis and lost. She had a suburban childhood, with her grandmother, but it was a significant childhood: she could have made a memoir out of it. Why did she choose to eschew a genuinely significant history for one that was patently false?

As a publisher, I will be found equally guilty, which frees me up to take a stab at the answer. "Misha Defonseca", despite her protests that she made up an alternative reality in which she believed devoutly, in order to deal with her life, had settled on a basic truth: memoirs sell better than fiction. A memoir or a biography carries with it the jolt of the known, the trusted. A good memoir allows us to think: we could have been there, we weren't, but here is someone who will take us there. A great memoir allows us to think: we are there, courtesy this writer who has been our vehicle.

Misha's story would make a great novel. Why did she feel the need to commit it to a non-fiction form? The market has a lot to do with this: it's over-saturated with fiction. This means that writers like Misha will gravitate to the protection of "This is a true story" in order to sell their books. As a novel, Misha's dancing with wolves story may have sunk without a trace; as a memoir, it was guaranteed to sell and to find audiences.

Yes, I understand the temptations. But personally speaking, I'm a purist. When the label on a book says "fiction", I'm not looking for autobiography, even if it might be there. When it says "memoir", I expect that. I look at my copy of Misha Defonseca's "life", and I feel a sense of betrayal. Either tell me the truth "" or tell me it isn't the truth. But please, be honest. Is that so hard?

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com  

The author is chief editor, Westland/ Tranquebar; the views expressed here are personal