The University of Idaho Argonaut

Writers spin fantastic tales meant to engage their chosen audiences. This is true for novelists, memoirists, technical writers, those who write about travel and even award-winning college columnists.
It is the job of anyone who puts pen to paper — or finger to keyboard, these days — to do their best to bring in readers any way they can.

Lying about one’s work, however, is the ultimate sin.
Plagiarism claims and admissions have been popping up in the news far too much lately for my taste. I can’t stand it. Every time a new case comes to my attention, I throw up in my mouth and a small part of my soul dies.
And when someone admits that their supposedly true story is full of lies, I get angry and I feel betrayed.

So, James Frey, Mischa Defonseca, Margaret B. Jones, JT LeRoy — whose work I actually liked — and now Thomas Kohnstamm, you can all go to hell.
Kohnstamm is claiming that the travel books he wrote for Lonely Planet Books are false, specifically that he didn’t travel to Columbia for a guide he wrote about the South American nation.

Granted, I wouldn’t want to go to Columbia, either, but it was his job. He’s supposed to be brave and adventurous. Instead, he’s about to make a bunch of money for being a liar.
His book “Do Travel Writers Go to Hell? A Swashbuckling Tale of High Adventures, Questionable Ethics and Professional Hedonism” is set for release next week. In the book, Kohnstamm states that he wrote international travel books from San Francisco and that he sold drugs to supplement his income.

Right now, I’m inclined not to believe him. Why should I? When the “truth” seems produced just to make an extra buck, I refuse to believe it.
True or not, I’m not buying his book. He can starve for all I care. Not every travel writer will go to hell — Bill Bryson probably has a cloud reserved for him — but Kohnstamm definitely should.

Unfortunately, many people will buy his book, getting him time on national talk shows and plenty of other exposure.
Part of me almost didn’t write this just because I knew it would only drive some of you to his work, hence putting more food on his plate.

But that’s the great thing. You get to decide for yourself if you buy Kohnstamm’s story — literally and figuratively.
Who knows? Maybe the writing is good. Millions of people chose not to seek refunds after buying Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” because the writing was decent. Many of them even bought his next book.

LeRoy was suppossed to be a maverick music writer, a young homosexual boy who managed to get backstage for shows I would love to have covered. Turns out LeRoy wasn’t a gay version of Cameron Crowe. Instead LeRoy is actually a woman and a few years older than her LeRoy persona. I’m mad at her for making me believe in someone that didn’t exist, but I can’t deny that the writing is great.

So maybe we need a new literary category and I know where we can get it.
There is one place where we never expect the entire truth. We go in knowing there will be composite characters and chronology might be altered.

When we see movies and those words “Based on a True Story” precede everything else, we know we will get some — but not all — of the truth.

Look for the new “based on true stories” section coming soon to a bookstore near you. It’s either that or everything should be labeled fiction.