Written by Brenda Nicholas

In the headlines lately—in the bookish universe— is the story of the Belgian writer, Misha Defonseca, who admits that her memoir, "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years," about escaping the Nazis during WWII by running away with a pack of wolves, is a fabrication.

I don’t know about you, but I wonder when/if the novel has inherited such a bad rap that emerging writers feel the need to disown it entirely? If this is the sad case than writers need to step up to the challenge and write stories that live up to the lost novel’s esteem.

Defonseca's truth-be-told story claims the memoir is really a fantasy that evolved from A.) her tough life and B.) her childhood fascination with wolves. She claims "Apart from my grandfather, I hated the people who looked after me. They treated me badly … [I] always felt Jewish," and she says "There are times when it is difficult for me to tell the difference between what was reality and what was my interior universe."

In other words, she has classic psychological problems that fueled her creative juices in a way that transforms the people who raised her into wolves. I can think of a number of honest ways she could have approached her story and still called it a memoir.

Or, she could have called it a novel.