I went to college with a girl who self-published “true stories” from our college days, all of which had been rewritten to make her the hero (instead of, say, the destructive drunk). You would think it would be fun to hate-read but the writing is so fucking terrible that I can never stand more than 5-10 pages.

Yeah, this whole thing was not well thought out. I think the memoir also includes the tasty tidbit that she married a lawyer in a specific year that, with the age she had recently been claiming to be, would have made her, like, 12 when she married. Did she not get the memo that if you’re trying to shave 8 years off of…

I think the best retort so far (on Twitter) was, you were 18 in 1999 and 29 in 2016?

I imagine it’s part of a narcissistic worldview where they can’t conceive of any situation where they’re not the center of the universe. Either that or it’s relentlessly cynical self promotion. Get your “brand” out there by whatever means necessary. *gag*

Honest question, do you think women do this type of tom foolery more, or we just come down harder on them than men? I think about the woman who wrote the “first female Maasai warrior” garbage and there has been at least one other story that reminds me of this to come out in the last few years.

I really don't understand fake memoirs. If you're going to are something up, just write a fictional novel. It must be some kind of ego thing where you have to make everything about you. Plus, I guarantee she has told these stories so many times she actually now believes they are true.

Yeah, it’s not even about the incidence of sexual violence during war—it’s about what those darkies all secretly want to do pretty white women.

I am a huge fan of BarbieSavior. It should be required reading for everyone wanting to join some kind of international relief effort, to separate the goodhearted with valuable skills from the bored well-to-do seeking “personal growth.”

You see a lot of it as a medical student.

“Clearly Ms Linton does not seem to take this into consideration nor does she seem to understand that freedom of expression comes with responsibility.”

For some reason my favourite part of all of this is she claims to have been there in 1999, meaning she’d have to be 35. Years of lying about her age (by nearly a decade?) wasted for a crappy memoir.

#But in this case I gotta say that it takes serious balls to actually make up an entire armed conflict that the historical records show never happened.

her target audience would be surprised to discover that ‘Africa’ is not a country.

As a Scot who loves Zambia, I’d like to point out I’ve never heard of Ms. Linton.

“A ‘skinny white muzungu with long angel hair’, Louise was an anomaly in darkest Africa” - part of a description of her book. Also: “Still struggling with the untimely loss of her mother, Louise found comfort in her bond with Zimba, a six-year-old orphan girl who she came to love as her own.”

So, noramally I don’t fully get controversies about inaccuracies in memoirs, because my understanding is that memoirs are supposed to be loose and factionalized retellings that capture the “mood” of real events, feature composite characters, made up situations that resemble real ones that occurred several times, etc.