Misha Defonseca's memoir left a sticky trail of lies about escaping Nazis and living with wolves. (It turns out wolf saliva isn't an antiseptic.) Tired of careless fabricators, Slate writes a how-to for aspiring fakers:
- Keep it vague. Dates are verifiable—"awhile" is not.
- Watch out for tattling siblings. Revenge can be dirty, especially if you kill them off in your faux memoir (as Margaret Seltzer recently discovered).
- Check your paper trail. That goes for elementary school registers, which gave away Defonseca's real whereabouts.