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The Delusion of the Polygraph
A few weeks before the release of my first book, a memoir about my mother’s murder, I had to take a polygraph exam. The two things were not in fact related, but that was easy to forget once I found…
Fake-memoir scandals have erupted more or less continuously as long as America has existed, from James Frey and his contemporaries, to the so-called autobiographies of Howard Hughes and Davy Crockett, to fantastical captivity narratives of the colonial era and dubious accounts of European explorers in the New World. Krapohl begins with a blithe, moralistic tirade about “the phenomenon of mendacity” that “pervades every class and culture.” Lying, he claims, is endemic to certain types of people, having “served to defend or expand the interests of uncounted generations of monarchs, merchants, spouses, debtors, knaves, and saints.” The lie detector came straight out of science fiction, and drifted into the realm of fact at the beginning of a century in which a succession of groundbreaking technologies would shatter and reshape our cultural conceptions of what was possible: Edison’s bulbs, Bell’s telephone, Ford’s mass-produced cars, the Wright Brothers’ airplane.
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