By John "F. Scott Fitzgerald" Grooms (as pictured)

Word is out today that yet another well-publicized memoir is nothing but a pack of lies. Margaret B. Jones, author of Love and Consequences, released last week to critical acclaim, admitted that her story — of life as a half-white, half-Native American girl who grew up in L.A. as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods — was completely made up. This revelation comes on the heels of last week's news that a Holocaust memoir by Misha Defonseca was a fake, and of course, there was that nasty business two years ago over James Frey's phony "memoir," A Million Little Pieces.

As a writer of memoir and history, I find this latest scandal very discouraging. Because of these writers' lying ways, there's no guarantee now that anyone will believe my own, absolutely true story of working undercover in the White House in my disguise as "Dick Cheney," where I convinced the Chimp-in-Chief to invade Iraq in order to prove he had bigger cojones than his old man. You might say I achieved "Mission Accomplished" — and now, the chances of Republicans controlling the government are damned slim for the foreseeable future. Hey, it was for the long-term good of the country; plus, at least my story is true. In fact, I hereby renew my pledge that I will never use someone else's writing and claim it as my own. After all, these are the best of times, the worst of times, the age of wisdom, the age of foolishness, and I believe in living up to a maxim I came up with years ago: "He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone." OK, that's it, see you next time. And so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.