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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Relatives of bestselling memoirist Jennifer Lauck say that "Blackbird," her book about her miserable childhood, is full of lies.
Dec 12, 2001 | Pain is no stranger to either Jennifer Lauck or Jonathan Lantry. Lauck, a 38-year-old writer and mother, is the author of two memoirs, "Blackbird" and the recently published "Still Waters," which when combined chronicle a miserable childhood made even worse by the almost classically wicked stepmother she calls "Deb." Lantry, a 39-year-old carpenter, is Lauck's stepbrother, son of "Deb," and shared that terrible childhood with Lauck for three years. Lauck's pain -- specifically in the form of "Blackbird" -- was blurbed by Frank McCourt, validated by Oprah and Rosie O'Donnell and reviewed by national glossy magazines. It can be read in 15 languages. "Blackbird" was on the New York Times Bestseller List for three weeks, and has sold some 100,000 copies in the United States. Recently it was nominated for the Oregon Book Awards nonfiction book of the year.
"Blackbird" has its Dickensian elements. Adopted by Janet and Joseph "Bud" Lauck, Jennifer was 7 when her mother died. Her family then went from living a middle-class life in Huntington Beach, Calif., to a disjointed existence in Downtown Los Angeles. Her father married "Deb," a member of the "Freedom Community" church, a pseudonym Lauck uses for what was in actuality the Church of Scientology, and then had a fatal heart attack. At age 10, Lauck and her brother, Bryan, were orphans and left in the care of their cold, authoritarian stepmother who attempted to break the little girl's will. Lauck writes of being mistreated by "Deb," sexually molested by a counselor at a church-run summer camp and, finally, abandoned by the awful stepmother, sent at age 10 to live by herself in one of the church's group homes and to earn her keep by working as a janitor's assistant at a local school. Years later her brother committed suicide.
The Denver Post called "Blackbird" "heart-wrenching, vividly remembered, and shockingly real."
Lantry thinks not. "She's lying her freakin' head off," he said from his home in Napa, Calif. And he's not alone in thinking so.
In that spirit, Lantry is attempting to marshal enough testimony and hard evidence to prove Lauck's nonfiction so full of holes that it must be reclassified as fiction either by the publisher, Pocket Books, or by the New York Times. Willamette Week, a local Oregon newspaper, first brought his claims to light on Oct. 17. Since then, Lantry has enlisted his mother, other family members and family friends from the time period covered by "Blackbird" in his campaign to debunk Lauck's memoir.
Lantry says there are more than 100 eyebrow-raisers in "Blackbird." "She ties together all of her untruths with basic truths," he says. Some of those inaccuracies seem minor enough to be the result of honest misremembering: the cost of a dog, the color of a car, how many hours a day were spent in a swimming pool, the view from a home. Lantry maintains that Lauck has in numerous instances messed around with timelines and gotten ages and dates wrong. Lauck, Lantry points out, even gets her own father's middle name wrong; it is Everett, not Edward. (A copy of Mr. Lauck's death certificate confirms this.)
In one scene that has particularly touched readers, Lauck describes being told by "Deb" that she would have to move the beloved bedroom set given to her by her father to her new room in the group home all by herself. Lauck relates her grueling and piteous labors in moving the furniture, piece by piece, over a distance of 11 city blocks. Lantry insists that the distance was not 11 blocks but a mere 100 yards.
