The whole truth about porkies on the page

Ishmael Beah's A Long Way Gone, an autobiographical story of a child soldier in the 1990s Sierre Leone civil war, has sold 650,000 copies in America and has just come out in paperback in Britain. It's even become the primary text of campaigners against using children in war. But serious doubts have now emerged about its veracity because of an inconsistency in dates.

Beah is standing by his memoir for the time being. If the gist of his story is true, then surely he should be forgiven for not having a perfect recall of all the facts? After all, he was only 12 when he escaped into the bush and was high on various drugs at the time.

The jury is still out on Beah but if his book turns out to be fraudulent then he is only following a well established tradition. James Frey was exposed in 2006 for making up huge chunks of his drug and alcohol memoir, A Million Little Pieces. He initially stood by his book - "I stand by my book and my life" - before coming clean and apologising on air to Oprah Winfrey.

Paradoxically, Frey's admission that he exaggerated his book initially enhanced his sales. Another American author, Augusten Burroughs, found himself at the centre of a $2 million lawsuit over dubious facts in his bestselling memoir, Running with Scissors.

Does it matter if writers fabricate their life story? Not if you were the late Miles Kington. His memoirs, Someone Like Me, was by all accounts the most unreliable memoir of childhood ever written, composed of events misremembered from his life, things that had happened to someone else and full of improbable porkies worthy of Jeffrey Archer. As he wrote: "Of course, I only have my mother's word for that."

Despite Kington's best efforts, readers thought it was all true. And there's the rub. What ultimately matters is not whether stories are true or not but whether you believe them to be true. Keith Richards cannot even remember his life story but it hasn't stopped Weidenfeld & Nicolson from shelling out £3 million for him to put pen to paper. The Rolling Stone has been a long way gone in every sense but I'm sure it won't detract a jot from our enjoyment of his spiffing (or should that be spliffing) yarn.

But perhaps the best way to circumvent the problem of an impaired memory is to emulate Dave Eggers. Last year he wrote the life story of a Sudanese refugee, What is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng, and presented it in fictional form. So although it bore a close resemblance to Deng's real life experiences, it did not claim to be the gospel truth. As Ralph Emerson said, fiction reveals truth that reality obscures.