Giving Memoirs a Bad Name

Okay so another author went all "James Frey" on us and totally faked her memoir. Great. Way to crap all over my favorite genre, Margaret B. Jones.

Here's the report on Slate, as they ask how it is that editors are so bad at spotting these memoirs now that another one has been publicly exposed as fiction. And really, how can they? Are they supposed to fact-check everything that someone remembers? Are they supposed to call the gang members this girl claimed to know and see if they actually knew her? Maybe not. It might have been good to at least double-check to see if James Frey spent two months in jail. Police records are public knowledge. Maybe then they'd see he only spent three hours there.

DESPITE ALL THIS...
My big question is: who really cares? I mean, no, it isn't fair to people who actually did live totally screwed up lives and end up writing about them, but is genre really all that important? Is it bad enough to recall books and cancel a book tour, like what happened to this Margaret Jones woman? Personally, I loved James Frey's books. When I found out it wasn't all true, it didn't make me want to throw A Million Little Pieces out the window. It made me want to read it again.

Thoughts?