Duane Gundrum Books,Memoirs,News,Politics,Writing Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up

The “Three Cups of Tea” author, Greg Mortenson, has been accused of making up stories in his book.  Accused by Jon Krakauer of CBS’s 60 Minutes, Mortenson denies the falsehood claim and is not commenting further due to a medical condition he is suffering from recently. Unfortunately, with him out of commission and not on record to defend himself, the media frenzy will probably swarm him at this horrible time for him. Hopefully, he gets a chance to defend himself, and the truth is reached, regardless of what that truth might be.

With this accusation, the writing community appears to be undergoing yet another challenge, as it did when the whole James Frey controversy occurred with “A Million Little Pieces”, a book that featured numerous made-up events in a book claimed to be entirely non-fiction. Hopefully, the accusations will not continue to paint a dark light on the many works other writers have put out there, making it so that readers walk into every bookstore, expecting fiction in the non-fiction section and accepting each memoir produced as a “quasi-” real account.

I recently published my “Neo Revolutionary Messages” on Kindle and Nook, and I promise that it is entirely non-fiction, as it is an analysis of the August 1991 Coup d’etat in the Soviet Union (where Boris Yeltsin challenged the hardliners when they imprisoned Mikhail Gorbachev). Yet, with stories like the one I linked here, there’s always the fear that a reader is going to think the author took liberties with the facts for the sake of trying to tell a better story.

3 thoughts on “Another Writer Accused of Making Stuff Up”

  1. That being said…it is important to realize that our own skewed perceptions of reality is what reality is…so, thinking in those terms – ALL memoirs are skewed and contain falsehoods. Not that there are inaccuracies, so to speak, but that everyone’s perceptions of what is TRUE is different.

  2. Strangely enough, I’ve been apprehensive about attacking Mortenson over this until I hear more, but the more I keep hearing, the worse it gets. What I have noticed is that the indie market writers are outright hostile about this situation (taking sides against him). The mainstream media seems a bit indifferent, however.

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