Remember James Frey? He's the jackass who tried to pass off his book A Million Little Pieces, a tale of addiction and recovery, as a true-to-life memoir. At one point, the book soared to #1 and Frey was hailed as a symbol of hope. About two years ago, though, it turned out that he was a big liar, and the media fiasco that followed was highlighted by an on-air comeuppance at the hands of Oprah.

Earlier this month, news broke that the same thing had happened again, and twice; this time, though, the details are even more outlandish. One of the authors, a certain Margaret Seltzer, claims in Love and Consequences: However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy to have grown up as a part-Native American foster child in South Central L.A., dodging bullets, making crack and learning tough lessons from gangsters. Turns out she's just a rich kid from the suburbs who went to private school. The other impostor, Misha Defonesca, falsely claimed in Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years that: a) she's Jewish, b) she killed a Nazi soldier and c) she was raised by wolves during a two-thousand mile trek across Europe.

This is hilarious. First, Seltzer seems to personify that semi-condescending infatuation with ghetto culture evident with so many Tupac-blasting suburbanites. Busted! Second, could Misha have come up with a more ridiculous story? Are these women serious?

I think these three faux-memoir cases highlight an interesting trend: more and more Americans seem to be lying about their pasts in order to gain fame or acceptance. Whether it's through embellished stories or padded résumés, what I'll term "creative autobiography" is a craze sweeping the nation.

My own initiation into this peculiar world of self-definition came at age sixteen, when a woman named Marilee Jones, admissions director at MIT, spoke to my high school about college applications. Her advice boiled down to this: "Do only what you love, and be honest."

"Wow!" I thought. "So I don't have to pretend to be interested in Model UN to survive! My skimpy list of accomplishments is fine without embellishment!"

Ah, the naïveté of youth.

Last April, silly Marilee was embroiled in a Freygate of her own. Turns out she fabricated not one, not two, but three college degrees on her way to greatness. If even this prophetess of honesty turned out to be a charlatan, who's to tell us what's right?

Maybe most people are just too ethical to lie about their pasts, but I doubt it. Creative autobiography wouldn't be such a big hit if it didn't work. So, let's consider an example of its success: take — oh, I don't know — the presidency, for example.

Did you know that both our president and vice president have been arrested for drunk driving? I bet you didn't. Overall, Bush has had his mug taken three times, and Dick, lagging behind, has two arrests. Lesson: you can hide things in your past. You don't go for the big lie (i.e., "I was raised in South Central and cooked crack," or "I'm a Jewish Holocaust survivor raised by wolves"); instead, you aim to parse the truth just a wee bit. And, when pressed on the matter, you use some clever doublespeak. For example: Bush responded to questions during his 2000 campaign about a past arrest for cocaine by saying that he hadn't used illegal drugs in the past 25 years. This doesn't answer the question, of course, but Bush was successful: the past remains comfortably obscure.

It looks as if the trend of misrepresenting one's past is widespread and going nowhere fast. You might wish honesty was a more highly-prized virtue, but where people can get away with something, they'll try it. Maybe nice guys really do finish last.

But we shouldn't be too hasty to imitate our illustrious writers, admissions directors, and commanders-in-chief; after all, our generation is the first to have a voluminous record kept of our youthful follies and indiscretions. Whether on Facebook, Juicy Campus or credit card records, our identities are no longer so easily protected. In 30 years, a politician who claims he never did drugs (or a memoirist who claims she made them) will have a much harder time pulling the wool over our eyes, thanks to inopportune photos plumbed from the depths of cyberspace. The window of opportunity for past-life sleight-of-hand is narrowing, and it's for the better.

So, creative autobiography can get you places (like the White House), but it can also earn you a scolding from Oprah, and, as it becomes harder and harder to get away with, people will have to rely more and more on things they've actually accomplished. It sounds boring, I know — who doesn't love catching someone in a lie? — but that's just the way it is. Let the résumé-editing begin.

Ted Hamilton is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be contacted at thamilton@cornellsun.com [1]. He is a contributing columnist this semester.