Lily Burana’s Memoir Is Not the Fake KindLily Burana, the author of stripper travelogue Strip City and the novel Try sold a third book today to Weinstein Books, a Diablo Cody–blurbed memoir called I Love a Man in Uniform. Described in the press release as “a memoir of an unlikely Army wife with a punk-rock past,” the book is about Burana’s marriage to her husband, a lieutenant colonel on staff at West Point, and her subsequent “extraordinary personal transformation from bohemian East Villager to resident of the ultimate conformist community of Army culture.” But since so many “extraordinary personal transformations” have been debunked these days — what with Misha Defonseca and James Frey and most recently Margaret Jones a.k.a. Seltzer — Burana has preemptively stocked her MySpace account with pictures and documents of her punk-rock days to back up her story. Or, rather, she writes, in Diablo-ese, with “moldy-oldy pics in hopes of establishing a soupcon of cred.” But seriously: “It’s hard out here for a memoir-pimp,” she writes. “What with all these fakey-fake hucksters stinkin’ up the track. I hate that there’s so much b.s. in memoir-ville that we have to read through a scrim of doubt, but I’m doing what I can to hatch some trust.” Well, thanks, silly Lily! The last thing the literary world needs is another Fraud Maude!*
Lily Burana [MySpace]
Related: Army’s Fashion Fatigue [NYT]
*Okay, seriously? Is writing like this going to be the new thing? Because if so, we might have to become strippers or something.