The worlds of Oprah, public libraries, the publishing industry, and me collided a few years ago when we were all suckered by the same fake memoirist. I’ve adopted memoir as my genre. I’m very sensitive to just how factual you need to be to call your piece memoir, and just how cloudy you need to be to protect the privacy of the people in your life. It’s actually called “creative memoir” to get at that in-between place where you’re being true to your emotional experience, but not necessarily factually accurate about the date and time stamp of every event you recount.
This post is about Nasdijj of The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams and The Boy and the Dog Are Sleeping and Geronimo’s Bones. All were, essentially, about his benighted life as a half-Navajo migrant worker who adopts terminally ill children and nurses them through their deaths.
Naaaaaassssssssdddddiiiiijjjjjjj. Fraud with a capital “I sent his ass cash money for a year I am such a sucker.”
Yes, a gullible leftist bleeding heart, I contacted him from his blog where he was pouring out his woes about poverty and racism and said, “I need to keep reading your work and I’d like to do what I can to make sure you can write.” So, I sent that particular fake artiste monthly checks so he wouldn’t have to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken out of dumpsters on Thanksgiving. I sent him money so he could buy medicine for the little boys with AIDS he was single-handedly caring for. I sent him money so he could travel to Native American reservations doing research for his upcoming books. I sent him money so he could make me abstract watercolor-paged books with “poetry” I couldn’t begin to make sense of. I sent him money to autographs his third big, fat lying book for me.
I stopped when I got to the post in his blog that said the morning after a tsunami, his daughter, who just happened to be traveling in that part of the world at the time, was found single-handedly caring for a tent full of naked little orphans when the storm cleared. OK, I did stop sending him money at that point.
F***me.
How much did I send him? Well, the figure I gave Hubby when he asked was $300. Between you and me? It was something more than that but you’ll never get it out of me because I refuse to think about the humiliation long enough to calculate it.
By the by, I HIGHLY recommend his books. They are some of the best American memoir of the current era and baby, I would know, I Am The Snake Lady Librarian.
But what I really recommend is that you tell other people about his books – and don’t tell them Nasdijj is a fraud! Don’t tell them he’s just a white guy from Michigan who adopted a fake Native American persona. It will ruin everything. It’s hard to feel sad over the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome-related seizure death of his five-year-old son Tommy Nothing Fancy if you know ahead of time that the boy didn’t exist. Similarly, it is difficult to bask in the heartstring-pulling profundity of another little boy, this one stricken with AIDS, begging Nasdijj to adopt him because all he wants to do is play little league and they don’t let you play little league in foster care when this child, you guessed it, never existed.
I recommend them because they are THAT GOOD.
I can’t guarantee that my own upcoming memoirs on this blog will be as “deep” as Nasdijj. But I can tell you that while I don’t wish to expose or exploit the people in my past, the stories I tell are true to my own memories of the events within the reasonable confines of putting together a linear narrative.
And I hope to be both entertaining and engaging as I tell first the tale of my cross-continental library research & tourism adventures, and then my Library School Diaries.
Plum Librarian LLC 