Memoirs, it should be noted, are hardly a new area when it comes to fakery, though it seems now more than ever that poorly written stories featuring suffering, survival and epiphany are being cranked out at the rate where at least two a week are arriving in the review pile with moribund thuds. With such a production level, the three memoir scandals that rocked March 2008 will probably only be the start this year. Most repugnant to consider is the little-known-in-North-America-but-popular-in-Europe Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, by Misha Defonseca. The Belgian author Defonseca concocted a Jewish identity and a story so unlikely (she lived with wolves and killed Nazis, at age seven) that consulted Holocaust scholars were wary enough to ask her publisher not to release it. The publisher did not take the advice.

Then Margaret Jones — a half-white, half–Native American orphan who had been adopted by a South Central LA black family and had survived gang wars between the Bloods and the Crips — was revealed to be Margaret Seltzer. Seltzer is fully white and wholly from Sherman Oaks, making her memoir Love and Consequences, complete bull and her biography the most ridiculous since the works of JT Leroy, purported teenage lot lizard and Mary Gaitskill fan.

Reasonable doubt was also cast this month on Ishmael Beah’s A Long Way Gone, a best-selling memoir of being a child soldier in Sierra Leone that, according to several journalists, operates on an improbable timeline. Beah’s publisher FSG continues to stand by the book and says any notion that Beah couldn’t have been involved in civil war activities is the invention of hounding reporters.

Finding the fake memoir is certainly now a seasonal sport for journalists, but if anything has caused publishers to become sloppy or turn a greedy eye towards too-bad-to-be-true stories, it’s you.

Memoirs, like the cocaine trade, are essentially a demand side problem and out there in reader-land you sure like your trials and tribulations sadistic, your emotional climaxes big and simple and, most creepily, you want it all to be true. To push the analogy: demand equals scarcer supplies and an inevitable toot of detergent for addicts. Given this market for heightened reality, and its commensurately larger payout, you can see how the pressure could build for both author and publisher to spice up, if not fabricate, the truth. Interestingly, Beah’s book began as a fictional project before its finessing back into true story form.

When questionable memoirists are proven to be fakes, publishers always assume the stance — apropos of misery lit — of being the victims, blaming devious authors and taxed resources. Yet I’ve always wondered about that part of this increasingly familiar kabuki ritual. James Frey’s (pictured) exaggerations were found out when compared to publicly available documents. Creative Googling busted the JT Leroy mythos. Considering those writers aren’t arch criminals, is it purposeful ignorance on the part of publishers or, even more than you, do publishers want it all to be true?