People, as a rule, are generally awful, and when people start worrying about their reputations, they instinctively stretch the truth to make their lives more appealing than they actually are. So it's fun to read books about famous people talking about themselves. When you worry what you'll look like in the light of day, reality starts to bend.
Toward the end of his life, Ernest Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast, retelling his days with Gertrude Stein and F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1920s expatriate Paris. Even in the introduction, he gives the reader permission to treat his book like a piece of fiction, so we're clearly dealing with fuzzy memory. It's a book of impressions, which tells you more about the author than about what happened around him.
Hunter S. Thompson had grand plans for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the supposed true story of a heavily medicated journalist and his heavily medicated lawyer traveling to cover a motorcycle race. It starts as a glorious hallucination, and then the story doesn't fit together, and then it's just a dream that refuses to end. The book gets points for style, but I'm not sure anyone knows what actually happened.
You don't even have to be a writer to make stuff up. Great Exploration Hoaxes reveals a series of dubious claims from famous and not-so-famous explorers, covering everything from Cabot's supposed search for the Northwest Passage to Peary's suspicious visit to the North Pole. The author shows a wealth of sympathy for these intrepid, ambitious people who found themselves unable to tell the truth, and as an added bonus, he lists all his major sources so you can decide for yourself what might have actually happened.
The moral of this story is that ambitious people lie, and if you're doomed enough to be famous, you can lie as much as you want.
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