Another fictitious autobiography to sort through

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Recently it was revealed that "Love and Consequences," the autobiography of Margaret B. Jones, a half-white, half-Native American foster child who grew up dealing drugs for violent gangs in South Central Los Angeles, was a complete invention. The real author, Margaret Seltzer, grew up in a real family, in a nice neighborhood and went to private school and you'd think she'd be glad of it."Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," in which a Jewish refugee on the lam from the Nazis in Europe is saved by a pack of friendly wolves, also turned out to be a little wide of the factual mark. The author, it turns out, was not a refugee and not even Jewish. There were no wolves.And, it was also subsequently disclosed, the novels of JT LeRoy, a transgender, HIV-infected, homeless drug addict and male prostitute were actually the work of Laura Albert, a perfectly healthy-looking, apparently well-to-do middle-aged mother.As one literary agent said in defense of his profession: "It is not an industry capable of checking on every little detail."Sadly, to this list of fictitious works must be added my own autobiography, "Ascent to Magnificence," where some little details about my long and storied career seem to be at variance from what the nitpickers insist on calling "the facts."My only reply can be candor and a plea for your understanding.I was not in the Cambridge, England, laboratory assisting James Watson and Francis Crick when they postulated DNA as a double helix. I was on this side of the pond, so to speak, in high-school chemistry class, where I succeeded in burning acid holes in a brand-new cable-knit sweater. The sweater would be available for examination by skeptics, but my mother threw it out years ago.Nor was I "instrumental," as I believed I described it, in discovering and mapping the human genome. The whole idea is just stupid. Everybody knows genomes are those little statues with pointed hats that you put in the garden.I might have exaggerated somewhat about being at Little Big Horn with Custer; otherwise, I wouldn't be here, right? I was with Sitting Bull. I was in error when I said the Sioux were armed with AK-47s. They were M-16s. Sitting Bull would use only American-made weapons. He was very insistent on it.Another assertion that doesn't bear close examination is my claim to have ghostwritten Winston Churchill's Iron Curtain speech. You know, "From Stettin on the Baltic to Trieste on the Adriatic an iron curtain has descended across the Continent." I was 5 years old at the time and although Pittsburgh's John Greenleaf Whittier Elementary School had a very good kindergarten, I do not recall being able to read or write. I certainly didn't know where Trieste and Stettin were.One final word: The subtitle of my book is "Grow wealthy and lose weight." It won't do either.With deepest apologies and a promise of total honesty in the future, I remain your humble author and servant,Leo Tolstoy(Contact Dale McFeatters at McFeattersD(at)SHNS.com. Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.shns.com)