Is it true or is it

a skewed view of the author or is it fiction made out to be true or is it something else?

I have just read an article about a book called "The Salt Path". It is one of those "true" stories which are about "overcoming a situation". The only problem is that the book is not true - and the author of the book knew it. Somehow she managed to get it past Penguin and they published it. 

It is not the first time this sort of thing has happened - and it will not be the last. In 1995 the Miles Franklin Award was won by someone who called herself Helen Demidenko for a book she called "The hand that signed the paper". It was supposed to be fact but it turned out to be fiction. 

I do not care how well either book was written I object, and I object strongly, to them being published as "true" accounts. They are not even skewed views of something which actually happened. They are fiction. Those of us who buy the book believing it to be, if not completely true, at least something which actually happened are being defrauded. 

Should the author be required to repay the money? Is the publisher in any way liable? In all likelihood the author has already spent any money they have received. Can a publisher really be held liable for the lies of the author? Does the issue of "due diligence" really apply? What about those who, simply because of their family, are the subject of some fascination? Should "Spare" have been written at all? I think it should not have been but others would strongly disagree. 

A journalist's unease is what eventually exposed the author of "The Salt Path" - but not before a film was made as well. Will Penguin need to bear the losses of recalling and pulping the books still available for sale? I would assume they will.  

There is a book I did enjoy which is probably not as accurate as the author would have us believe. It was written by a Winifred Stegar. The book, "Always Bells" or "Life with Ali" is about her life and her marriage to an Afghan cameleer in our "outback". She made a trip to Mecca with him in the early half of last century and that can be shown to be the case. The book is no literary masterpiece but it is interesting. Yes, there may be some "embellishments" along the way but she spent the latter part of her life in a small country town where the Senior Cat met her and talked to her about people they knew in common and stories about her that he had heard from them. Yes, the evidence for her story is there. In the hands of an expert story teller it probably would have had a much greater impact. Nobody pretends it is some sort of accurate history. 

There are any number of "life stories", biographies and autobiographies out there which may be rooted in fact but still almost fictionalised accounts of lives of the rich and famous. The market for such things exist because those people fascinate at least some of us. There are also many well known people about whom very little is known. When people wonder why "So and So" has not appeared on "Who do you think you are?" it might be because there is very little which is dramatic or interesting enough for a television program to be made about that person. Writing a book about them would be equally difficult.

This is an issue I have had to face. I could have kept all the correspondence I amassed over the years I spent working on what became International Literacy Year. It was tempting, very temping. There were thousands of letters, some of them from people who could only have been described as "very important". It would have been easy to use them and make a name for myself - perhaps. Would it have been the right thing to do though? In the end I had to be honest with myself and say "no".  Do I regret destroying them? Yes but it would have been selfish to do that. I really only had a very small part in the whole thing. It was not my story to tell.The real story came from the people who worked so hard on projects which made a difference. 

There are some stories we do not have the right to tell,