When Sarah wrote her item last week about Jerome Weeks‘ comments on publishing assistant lit, we thought the story would probably end there. Little did we know that the book/daddy post would attract commentary from the notorious Tim Barrus, better known as the phony Native American memoirist Nasdijj. (How notorious? One 2006 wrap-up described him as “more inflammatory than the Frey folly and actually more manipulative than JT Leroy.”)
So what does Barrus have to say for himself these days? “The mythology would have you believe that I never told anyone who I really was while publishing books,” he complains. “The poor publicists. They were working to promote someone who was someone else. What phooey.” After all, he points out, whenever he went on book tours, the hotel reservations and airplane tickets had to be issued to Tim Barrus, right? Except then he turns right around and admits to setting up a “shell game” of “pretense and obfuscation” in order to get his books published, then moans:
“My crime was not pretense; it was getting caught. My fantasy that I would then write about that was deluded. They won’t touch it. Not because they don’t want to know. They know… The emperor is stark raving naked, and anyone who says so (in public) will have his head chopped off. I don’t write anymore. It’s not worth the grief.”
Of course, if you were around last year when I was posting extracts from Barrus’ account of his deceptive history, you know there’s another likely explanation for why none of the major or minor houses will touch the manuscript: It stinks. Lord, how it stinks.