“I had had no experience failing,” she writes, but soon she finds herself surviving freelance assignment to freelance assignment, living on and off welfare in a dirty Manhattan apartment where she sleeps on a mattress on the floor. Israel’s subject is ultimately herself, explaining and justifying her criminal activities. Israel’s memoir is sly and funny, exploring how easy it is to dupe a literary world hungry for any nibble of celebrity, more interested in the appearance of authenticity than in authenticity itself. Eventually, her crimes became bolder: she would steal real letters from archives, leaving behind forged replacements to cover her tracks. To get herself out of financial destitution, she turned to literary forgery, manufacturing letters by famous people (Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Noël Coward, and Lillian Hellman, primarily) and selling them for high prices. A book failed, and she had to turn to dreaded freelancing.

A professional biographer, Israel fell on hard times in the 1990s. Lee Israel (who died in 2014) published her memoir, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, in 2008. ( Consider the narrative leaps Spike Lee took to make Ron Stallworth’s good story, Black Klansman, into a good movie, BlacKkKlansman.)

It’s a strange paradox, but here we go: the reason a memoir gets written is because the story itself is good, is interesting, but the very nature of the genre means that the story is funneled through a narrow experience. Memoirs can seem uniquely uncinematic while also being perfectly suited to film.

Can you ever forgive me book