From Where You Dream

In Praise of the Fake Memoir: Delusion and deception are not generally considered admirable qualities for memoirists, but should a memoir be considered without literary value simply because the author is delusional or a fraud? Can we separate moral assessments of an author from the literary value of the book he or she produces? If the literary value of a memoir resides largely in its verifiable truth, are we then simply applying a less rigorous standard of literary quality to the memoir than to poetry or fiction?