Inspired by a recent “bad books” thread, are there books you have that are usually/ should be pulped - but you have them out of curiosity or interest (or to stop them circulating- one student of mine was firmly convinced one “memoir” was a true story)?

I started collecting “fakes”/“stolen” a little while back - my collection now includes a few like these:

  • Norma Khouri and her fake memoir, “Forbidden Love” - the documentary called “Forbidden Lie$” by Anna Broinowski where she fact-checks, deconstructed the entire story and even discovers worse news is really excellent.

  • “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” is a young adult novel by Kaavya Viswanathan - and I have a copy that wasn’t pulped. Apparently the film deal was pulled after multiple incidents of plagiarism was detected.

  • SmolesworthyBEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    I don’t know if this is what you mean, but The Hand that Signed the Paper by Helen Demidenko was a controversial winner of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize the Miles Franklin Award. It won best fiction even after Demidenko family memoir of WW2 Ukraine was revealed to have been written by Helen Dale, the daughter of UK immigrants.

    Demidenko and Khouri both feature in the Wiki article List of fake memoirs and journals.