Struggling fiction writers can be forgiven a small outbreak of Schadenfreude this week with the news that the publishing success story of recent times - true-life "misery-lit" - has been rocked by yet another fraud, writes Frank McNally
The latest scandal concerns a book called Love and Consequences, which purported to be the autobiographical story of one Margaret B Jones: a part-native-American girl taken into care at the age of 8, raised by a black foster mother ("Big Mom") on the mean streets of Los Angeles, and recruited into a drug gang called the Bloods.
It was a grim and dangerous life. One of the author's foster-brothers was murdered by a rival gang; so was an older friend who had looked after her. And as quoted by the New York Times, the writer herself claimed: "One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot." Unfortunately, this wasn't true. The writer's real-life sister saw the NYTprofile, accompanied by a photograph, and - shocked at what she was reading - blew the whistle.
It emerged that Margaret B Jones was really Margaret Seltzer, who was raised by her own all-Caucasian family in a wealthy LA suburb, attended a private religious-run school, and was never a member of any drugs gang. The publishers have since apologised and pulled the book.
Perhaps Seltzer will now turn to an alternative theme: a true-life tale of sibling treachery set among LA's privileged white community. But I can't help feeling some sympathy for her plight. Her mother says she was a social activist who just got caught up in the stories she heard. And besides, in common with many authors, Seltzer may have concluded that her book would be stigmatised or - worse - ignored if the public knew she had enjoyed a normal childhood.
Her outing is the latest in a series of cases in which authors have been accused of inventing or embellishing the awfulness of their early lives. A recent best-selling book about surviving the Holocaust, supposedly true, turned out to be fiction.
The story of a young HIV-positive male prostitute was in fact written by a middle-aged woman, whose sister-in-law played the protagonist in public appearances with the help of dark glasses and a wig.
And even here in Ireland, a best-selling memoir of a childhood in the Magdalene Laundries has been questioned, by, among others, the author's family, and the nuns (who have no record of her).
Frank McCourt shares some of the responsibility for this, however indirectly, for launching the whole phenomenon in the first place. In fairness, he was being ironic when he wrote on the opening page of Angela's Ashesthat his was "of course, a miserable childhood" and that "the happy childhood is hardly worth your while." But whether he knew it or not back in 1997, he was about to spark the publishing sensation of the next decade.
Since then, the demand for accounts of childhood misery has been insatiable: especially among women, many of whom may not even frequent bookshops but are targeted in supermarkets, where huge numbers of these titles are sold. Bookstores have not been behind the door in promoting them either.
Special shelves are now devoted to the genre: with headings ranging from "Painful Lives" to "Inspirational Memoirs."
The irony is that some of those who have conned their way into such sections are talented writers: all the more so since they had to make the stuff up. Love and Consequencesis a case in point.
Even as it fell for the cover story - hook, line, and sinker - the NYT'sglowing review now looks remarkably prescient. "Deeply affecting," the reviewer called the book, not knowing just how affected it was. On a more critical note, the review notes that the dialogue "can feel self-consciously novelistic".
But it adds that the author has done "an amazing job of conjuring up her own neighbourhood".
Clearly this was well-researched fiction. The problem is that, for the pesky book-buying public, fiction is not enough.
Neither is it enough for the author to be describing something that actually happened to somebody else. Fans of this genre need to know that the author suffered personally. And with profits rolling in, it is perhaps understandable if publishers don't look too hard at their clients' war-wounds.
Just as it didn't know what was about to happen 10 years ago, the books industry does not know what will happen now. Maybe all the scandals will kill the genre eventually, making way for the next big thing; or maybe misery-lit is here to stay. In the short term, perhaps the way forward is for bookshops to invent a new literary category for it: somewhere between memoir and fiction.
They could emulate the butter-substitute industry, perhaps: weaning misery-lit fans from their unhealthy obsession with an "I Can't Believe It's Not Fact" section.
If nothing else, this would offer a legitimate route into this profitable area for the many talented writers who have had happy, well-adjusted childhoods, through no fault of their own.