i want to say a word about the epidemic of hoax memoirs, or at least the epidemic of their detection. one factor, it seems to me, is the pervasiveness of the idea that stories are central to human lives: all human lives everywhere. or even that human lives just are stories, a bizarre, patently false truism of everything from high-end pomo philosophy to nike ads ("we are the stories we tell": well i guess by definition that makes the false narrative memoir impossible; you told it; hence, you are it). stories are artifacts we shape, by extrusion, exaggeration, invention: a way we shape the world and ourselves in order to present them to others at a moment that demands stories. it is a shape, among others. every story is partly false: false to the chaotic incomprehensibility of experience and identity. this is not to say that there are not stories more or less connected to facts. it's to say that when oprah demands the story of redemption, over and over and over, it has to be manufactured to be effective. stories are artifacts: carved out of reality.