Based on a Great Big Lie: Difference between revisions

* The ''[[Flashman]]'' books are all supposedly based on rediscovered memoirs written by the title character. This device (coupled with the impressive amount of research [[George Macdonald Fraser]] put into every volume) led more than one critic to believe they were the real deal.

* The book ''Michelle Remembers'', perhaps the most (in)famous alleged written account of Satanic Ritual Abuse, though helping to stir up the SRA witch hunt of the 80s/90s, has now been widely discredited. Mostly by many healthy doses of [[Fridge Logic]] - for example, a supposedly nonreligious 5-year-old having the presence of mind to rebuke Satanists with a cross, an 81-day ritual that summons the Devil himself during which none of the Satanists apparently need to eat, use the bathroom, or show up at work, and a fatal car wreck that strangely didn't turn up in a newspaper that reported on wrecks of even less serious nature at the time. One of the worst parts is that the titular Michelle (who later divorced her husband to marry the psychologist she was relating all of this to) blames her involvement in the abuse on her mother, who died of cancer when Michelle was 14. [http://www.witchvox.com/va/dt_va.html?a=cabc&c=whs&id=4349 This] article gives a detailed analysis of the book.

* The prologue to the original novel of ''[[The Phantom of the Opera]]'' has the author going into great detail about the "research" he did about the Opera Ghost, including digging through archives and interviewing some of the characters, claiming the story to be true. Two bits are verifiable: there was indeed an underground lake under the Paris Opera House and there was allegedly an accident in 1896 involving a falling chandelier that killed one person. Oh, and of course the real opera house provides the setting. But the rest is fabrication.

** What fell in real life was the counterweight of the chandelier, not the chandelier itself. Still, many of the book's characters are [[No Celebrities Were Harmed]] versions of real people who lived in Paris at the time. Some scholarly fans have claimed that everything in the book save for the Phantom himself was based in real experiences, though that most likely is still a gross exaggeration.

{{quote|The main advantage this book has over libraries, and indeed all of its almanackian predecessors, is that all of the historical oddities and amazing true facts contained herein are lies, made up by me. And it is this astonishing innovation that allows each entry to contain many more truths than if it were merely factual.}}

* ''[[Bravo Two Zero]]'', the memoirs of former SAS trooper and Gulf War veteran "Andy McNab", ended up becoming a severe embarrassment to the British Army thanks to this trope. First, another member of the squad — Chris Ryan, now a minor TV personality in the vein of [[Ray Mears]] — chimed in with his own memoir, painting McNab as a ''very'' [[Unreliable Narrator]] and blaming him for the mission's disastrous end. Another SAS veteran flew out to Iraq in 1993, retraced as much of the squad's route and interviewed as many witnesses as he could find, and discovered that both of them were equally guilty of inflating their stories. If they were exaggerating for the sake of a good story this would be bad enough, but they were apparently less than truthful during their debriefing sessions as well. Unfortunately, by the time this became generally known there were [[Follow the Leader|half a dozen other "true accounts"]] of the SAS in the Gulf War that showed equal regard for fact-checking. Peter Radcliffe, then-Regimental Sergeant Major of the SAS and the only Gulf War veteran of the Regiment to publish his memoirs without a pseudonym, devotes an entire chapter to the whole wretched business.

* Kathryn Stockett's ''[[The Help]]'', about a white woman's relationships with two black maids in the 1960s is an inversion of this. The book is fictional, but black maid Ablene Cooper is [http://abcnews.go.com/Health/lawsuit-black-maid-ablene-cooper-sues-author-kathryn/story?id=12968562 suing] the author because she claims one of the maids, Aibileen Clark is meant to be her. She was once the nanny for Stockett's brother. Cooper claims that the character has an uncanny resemblance to her, right down to a gold tooth.

* Liza Marklund co-authored a whole series of books together with a woman calling herself Mia, detailing the abuse and persecution Mia and those close to her suffered from her Muslim ex-boyfriend. The events in the books were claimed to be completely true with only names and places changed to protect those involved, and Marklund spent years using the books as proof in political debates. In 2008, Monica Antonsson wrote a book proving that the books about Mia are almost completely fictional. After trying to claim that Antonsson was lying, Marklund changed her tune and claimed the books were never meant to be taken as fact and were clearly fiction all along.