Smith is chair of the Department of English and Martha Guernsey Colby Collegiate Professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Michigan. In recent years, she has co-authored such books as Human Rights and Narrated Lives: The Ethics of Recognition (2004) and Reading Autobiography: A Guide to Interpreting Personal Narratives (2001).
Smith opened her lecture with a Doonesbury cartoon about Benjamin Franklin's series of letters in which he pretended to be Silence Dogood, a middle-aged widow. Published in 1722 when he was 16 years old, the letters ridiculed various aspects of life in colonial America; Harvard University was a particularly fond target for Dogood. Smith also referenced Clifford Irving's fabricated autobiography of Howard Hughes as another example of a writer deceiving a gullible public. The bogus autobiography netted Irving a prison sentence, but he later wrote a successful book describing the ordeal (appropriately called The Hoax), which was made into a movie.
Hoaxes, according to Smith, have giveaway characteristics with both internal and external evidence. Internally, a falsified text has multiple improbabilities, a generally sensationalistic script, vague details and a formulaic voice. Externally, it displays gaps in geography, history and documentation. Expert testimony and counterevidence can also be incriminating.
Smith proceeded by describing a taxonomy of hoaxes and delineated their full range. First on her list were "scam lives," exemplified by e-mails making urgent appeals for financial help. "These are more accurately labeled 'spam lives.' These compelling dramas of lives in ruin aim for making a quick buck," said Smith.
Next, Smith discussed "prosthetic enhancements of life," of which James Frey's "A Million Little Pieces" is a prime example. Frey embellished small charges against himself into a tale of drug and alcohol abuse. When Oprah Winfrey denounced Frey on her show in 2005, sales actually increased due to the added media exposure, and a sequel was rushed off to print.
Smith then discussed ethnic impersonation. Leon Carmen, a Caucasian man, pretended to be a part-aboriginal woman in "My Own Sweet Time," a book published in 1997 and was later stripped of the $5000 Dobbie Award when the hoax was revealed.
Another author, Forrest Carter, who held segregationist views and headed a Ku Klux Klan branch, fabricated an autobiography claiming to be a part-Cherokee child sent to an orphanage and later raised as an illiterate cowboy.
Plagiarized and fantasized lives are other forms of hoaxes, she said. Kaavya Viswanathan, a Harvard undergraduate, plagiarized passages from two Megan McCafferty novels for her own book, "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." A fantasized life is the byproduct of world historical events presented as testimonial writing. Bruno Doessekker, claiming to be a Holocaust survivor, published "Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood" under the name Binjamin Wilkomirski.
"This was a fictional collage using material from various literary and historical sources," explained Smith. "He had painful memories in a Swiss foster home, and was close to a traumatic event, but not a survivor of it. He desired to situate himself within world memory."
Lastly, Smith elaborated on false witnessing, as seen in Norma Khouri's "Honor Lost: Love and Death in Modern Jordan." "Khouri observes Dahlia's star-crossed love for Michael, a Catholic in the royal army. Khouri is a participant observer who must escape in order to survive. Violent patriarchs and beset womanhood satisfies Western fantasies," said Smith.
She also cited Souad's "Burned Alive: A Survivor of an Honor Killing Speaks Out" as a possible propaganda piece. The work, published under a pseudonym, claims to be the story of the story of a Palestinian girl who fled to Europe after an attempted honor killing by her brother-in-law for having had sex before marriage.
Smith said that manuscripts rejected as novels are sometimes later accepted when submitted as autobiographies, since the public expects better writing from works of fiction and are more forgiving when it comes to a "true story."
However, fabrications have damaging consequences, possibly hurting activists lobbying for a certain cause. Smith explained, "If a woman made up a story about being raped, an activist for rape prevention would have a hard time getting credibility."