Fake memoirs are all the rage. But in my case, creativity with the truth was simply not an option
My publisher made me send my manuscript to anyone who was mentioned in the book. Even my drug dealer

Author Tom Sykes writing in The Guardian on Easter Monday

It has been a vintage month for lovers of fake memoirs, the fastest-growing micro-genre in publishing, and one that will soon require its own shelf at Waterstones if current trends continue unchecked.

First came the news that Misha Defonseca, author of Misha: a Memoir of the Holocaust Years, had not, in point of fact, escaped from a concentration camp aged six, trekked halfway across occupied Europe and been raised by wolves en route. I know, I know - it seems so obvious now, doesn't it?

Then Margaret B Jones, author of Love and Consequences, a "first-hand" account of
life in a south-central Los Angeles gang, admitted that far from being a
mixed-race, gun-toting, crack-peddling member of the Bloods who used the
profits from her first drug deal to buy a burial plot, she was, in fact, a
33-year-old Caucasian Valley Girl and creative writing student by the name of
Margaret Seltzer. A prescient reviewer at the New York Times noted in a
glowing review of the book that it felt "self-consciously novelistic at
times". Fancy that!

As the author of a memoir myself, I understand only too well the temptations writers face to sex-up their stories. But in my case, creativity with the truth was simply not an
option: just days after I submitted the manuscript the American media went
into a frenzy when the writer James Frey was revealed to have invented large
swathes of his bestselling addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces.
My book is an addiction memoir as well, and so my publisher sat me down with a lawyer, who went through the manuscript with a fine-tooth comb, determined to root out any
inaccuracies or embellishments. They then encouraged me to send excerpts of
the manuscript to anybody who was mentioned in the book, and get them to
confirm that what I had written about them was accurate.
This seemed over the top to me (whatever happened to publish and be damned?) but it was a paranoid time in memoir-land, so I went along with it, even tracking down old school friends I
hadn't seen for 20 years and sending them emails that said things such as:
"Er, Hi, I've written a book and you're in it. This is what I wrote about
you. Is it OK?"

Most people were surprisingly sporting about the whole thing. A few objected so violently that
I had to change their names. Others took issue with the most unexpected
things. Take Chris Wilson, with whom I worked on the New York Post gossip
column. I had written in some detail about the freebie overseas holidays we
took, and the fact we got smashed almost every night for two years and rarely
saw a bill.
He rang me up in a fury.
"I can't believe you have done this to me! You have me using the word 'ridonculous' four times!
What the hell? I'll be saying fo-shizzle next!"
Then there was my sister Alice and her husband Chris. "Chris doesn't have a ginger beard! It's
blond."

What Did I Do Last Night? by Tom Sykes, is published by Ebury Press.

And here is a review from the New York Times. The book was published by Rodale in the US.

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