My friend Jezra Kaye from Prospect Heights sent a link to this very funny  Salon article to all on her email list, which she called a brilliant piece about the recent memoir scandal. Kaye is working on a memoir and has a business coaching speakers and speech writing. For more info go here.

Many of you have commented on the recent scandals surrounding fraudulent memoirists — particularly Misha Defonseca, the Belgian who manufactured a Holocaust past, and Margaret Jones, the white Sherman Oaks, Calif., woman masquerading as a half-Native American barrio gangsta.

In response to public outcry, Erewhon Publishing has instituted a stringent new "cards on the table" policy. In the future, every memoirist will be required to provide evidence of his or her dysfunction: arrest records, needle tracks, urine and stool samples — and in the case of Martin Amis, dental bills.

Scary relatives must provide DNA evidence of kinship. Wish-fulfillment detectors will be distributed to editors on an as-needed basis. In the meantime, Erewhon Publishing has instituted a comprehensive fact checking of our back catalog. While still in its preliminary stages, our review has already uncovered troubling inconsistencies in the following memoirs: