Wow. I swear, that phrase was on the tip of my tongue, and I discover that it’s been said. By “the British writer and psychologist Anthony Daniels” (aka Theodore Dalrymple) and quoted in a Washington Post piece by Anne Applebaum, who notes that James Frey is only the newest in a history of lying memoirists:

These fabricators reinvent themselves not as heroes but as victims, a status they sometimes attain by changing their ethnicity. Among them are Bruno Grosjean, aka Binjamin Wilkomirski, whose touching, prize-winning, “autobiographical” tale of a childhood spent in the Majdanek concentration camp turned out to be the fantasy of the adopted son of a wealthy Swiss couple. Another was Helen Darville, aka Helen Demidenko, whose touching, prize-winning “autobiographical” tale of a Ukrainian girl whose father was a former SS officer turned out to be the fantasy of a middle-class British girl living in the suburbs of Brisbane, Australia.

Applebaum next mentions Nasdijj, who was outed last week by Matthew Fleisher at LA Weekly. Nasdiff — real name, Tim Barrus — had been posing as a Navajo memoirist. To much critical aclaim.

Fleisher interviews a real Navajo who mentions that Nasdijj isn’t even a real name in the Navajo tongue of Athabaskan. It’s gibberish.

Alrighty, then, here are my questions. What would drive a writer to assume the identity of a martyr in order to attract attention? Is it a variation of Munchausen syndrome? Or are these people simply afraid to achieve excellence as an expression of personal triumph? That is, is this a way for gifted writers to avoid feeling guilty about their gifts?

More posts on James Frey here, here, and here.

Update: Esquire wrote a piece on Barrus…