A fabulist is a fabricator in the total sense of the word, a forger but also a constructor, someone who tells lies in the service of a grand project. The fabulist is always an aspirational figure, and the personal legend they create is the means by which they achieve their desired position, however briefly.
It seems as though every few years, the popular imagination is stirred by the exposure of a fabulist. An ambitious charlatan becomes the center of a brief spectacle in the workings of whatever small and rarefied world the fabulist has insinuated him- or herself into. In the course of a lifetime, one is liable to encounter at least a handful of bald-faced liars, but to find a fabulist is another thing entirely. The dictionary definition of “fabulist” does not distinguish the concept from that of a simple liar, but prolonged exposure to such a person suggests there is a qualitative separation between the two. If you’ve met a fabulist, and figured them out, you recognize the difference.
The liar and fabulist are clearly cousins of a sort–they both lie, to start–but the manner in which they go about their deception suggests a distinct separation of genus. There have been several public fascinations with a number of high-profile fabulists in the recent past. In 2010, Harvard student Adam Wheeler was arrested for forging letters of recommendation and high school transcripts, as well as numerous scholarship essays. Kari Farrell, the “hipster grifter,” charmed her way into the Brooklyn scene, even scoring a temporary job at VICE before being charged with forgery and attempting to pass over $60,000 worth of bad checks. Most recently, D.C. socialite Albrecht Muth came to prominence within US foreign policy circles through a series of fabricated connections,* and now faces charges for murdering his wife.
After exposure, most of the lies seem conspicuous (and indeed, one of the pleasures in reading about these exploits is marveling at the seemingly willful refusal of the rest of the people involved to see the obvious). But this self-congratulatory canniness fails to account for the ordinary qualities that a skilled fabulist can exploit to get what they want. If it appears that the subjects of a fabulist’s deceptions seem perversely willing to defend fictions, it’s because they are. If garden-variety liars lie to deflect and avoid, fabulists lie to invest and exchange. To be truly successful, a fabulist needs to sell something worth hoping for. If you want a certain kind of car enough, you might not be so willing to accept you’ve bought a lemon.
I first met Len in community college. I had failed my way there after a tumultuous childhood and had begun giving a great deal of thought to my limitations as a person. I don’t think it was a coincidence that she appeared when I had condemned myself to a small life, though it seemed miraculous at the time.
After our shared history class, she lamented to our professor the lack of good Thai food in town, and so I told her one of the few things I know to be true–that the measure of a Thai restaurant was the quality of its Tom Kha. She lit up, and asked me to show her. We ate subpar Tom Kha that night, she told me her life story, and then she got me stoned for the first time in my life. My innate shyness was thoroughly compromised. I knew I had to see her again.
There was something predatory about Len–she had sharp and expressive features, and always carried a hint of a strange excitement with her, as though she had just learned a secret. She dressed like a Parisian among practical, drab mountain people; her appearance was designed for notice. The curiosity she displayed in me was disarming. My painful shyness only seemed to further raise her interest, and I was first panicked, then drawn to her. She was brilliant, worldly, attractive, and utterly fearless.
Len had led a grand life–dual citizenship in Israel and the United States, a stint in the IDF followed by apparent conscientious objection, elite schooling in Rome and Moscow, and the cultivation of a seemingly thorough knowledge in almost any subject you could care to raise. What someone so traveled was doing enrolling at a community college (where she also claimed to teach) in small-town Colorado was not a question I thought to ask, so dazzled was I with her confidence. She seemed young, but preternaturally capable enough for that to escape notice. In her company I began to question my sense of self. I was amazed someone like Len bothered–insisted, even–to spend time with someone as small and vulnerable as I thought myself to be.
I supposed there had to be something valuable about me that I couldn’t see. It seemed as though only through Len could I find it. I fell into her orbit.
Certain types of people flocked to Len: timid boys with developmental disabilities, bright, sweet artists, anyone visibly nursing self-doubt. It seemed as though we had been waiting our whole lives to meet her. She had a carefully devised life story for each of us. In one version, she was a retired ballerina, a painter, a Jordanian immigrant. In another she was an intrepid aid worker and traveler, who had served refugees in a vague corner of “war-torn Africa,” hiking across deserts and repairing bikes. Len was an all-purpose kindred spirit. I considered her the most remarkable person I had ever met.
It’s a testament to our stake in Len’s promise that we believed in it for as long as we did, failing to cross-reference our unsupported stories. I dismissed several obvious red flags–her panic when someone knew where she was when she didn’t want them to, her ever-growing list of accomplishments, a revolving door of roommates, openly faked family deaths to score extra time off work, her 9/11 trutherism. Two years after I met her, I learned that the pilot program she claimed to attend at our university didn’t exist. Neither did the out-of-town jobs she worked, or the family members she had installed in various far-flung places. The sheer amount of legwork, the number of faked phone calls, the staged “trips out of town” and blind bluffs required to keep all of our plates spinning at once, was breathtaking. What had once seemed unassailably solid had dissolved.
In the months before I learned all this, the strain of balancing all these lies had begun to show in her. She abruptly stopped speaking to some of our friends, but I still hoped against hope that things could somehow be fixed. There was by then a core group of four of us, Len and her three devotees. We loved Len and one another. I recognized happiness in myself, with my small chosen family, and I attributed to them the nascent sense of functionality that I was starting to experience.
The last time I saw Len, we had arranged to meet on campus. She was cagey about where she was coming from and when she would arrive, so I waited. As I sat, another of the three devotees rang. She had been trying to get in touch with Len unsuccessfully, she had bought travel vouchers for a recently aborted trip to Australia with Len. Len had yet to pay her back. When Len arrived and I told her of the call, she grew livid. Who else had I told about our meeting? Did I know what I’d done? How this could hurt her? How could I do this to her? I was blindsided and could only stammer in response. When she had calmed down, we walked across campus to take check on Len’s student loan status. We visited a cavalcade of administrative offices, her information apparently having been lost within the loan system.
At the end of our campus tour, Len told me she was leaving town for good and starting a new life in LA. It was the most selfless lie she ever told me. I resolved to live without her, despite the terror I felt, a terror borne both of the prospect of losing her. By now everything about her seemed suddenly changed; her warmth was decidedly gone, and she dismissed everyone we knew as shallow and callous, insisting our clutch of friends “deserved each other.” I spoke against her then for the first time, more to my own surprise than hers. After that, we wandered through a bookstore in silence until she gave me a terse, polite goodbye.
I knew I would never see her again. I walked to my car and wept, and called the rest of the members of our group, most of whom had broken contact with Len some time before. The next day they called in sick from work to host a party for me. After the festivities, the whole truth was laid bare–the wildly different life stories, the fraudulent Australian trip, the nonexistent jobs. We weren’t even sure if we had her real name.
I called my mother, and she said she had known Len was a fraud since the early weeks of our friendship. She didn’t tell me, she said, because I wouldn’t have listened.
I can derive little pleasure from the willingness of Harvard professors and diplomats to defend the frauds they’ve been subject to because she was absolutely right. Fabulists invest and exchange. The apparent value of what Len offered me seemed so great that I became willfully blind, and that’s the difference between a liar and a fabulist. I would have given Len anything. A liar would have merely stolen from me.
At first I couldn’t understand why she sought to fool a bunch of quiet community college students, of all people. We adored her, to be sure, but she was talented enough to have landed a more impressive position, among more impressive people. But in retrospect, those of us who loved her were sentimental and vulnerable; perhaps we advertised an emotional vacancy she was ready to fill. Why she felt she had to lie to do so is something I can’t understand.
But calling what Len did simple manipulation seems inadequate. It obscures the willing, even eager role we played in her games. I’ve come to believe that prodigal liars, like Len, like Adam Wheeler and Albrecht Muth, succeed in part because of their ability to exploit the needs and vanity of their audience. What makes Len loom so large in my memory, even now, was her facility for anticipating and meeting my unspoken emotional needs. At one point she spoke to me words I had just thought. Her social intelligence was not a little terrifying.
There were times when Len delivered on her promises–she could be sweet, consoling, insightful, and she would not stand to hear me speak harshly of myself. I like to think that in those moments Len was being an authentic version of herself, but in all honesty I know her true inner life was completely alien to me. I can’t now know whether she was motivated by illness, trauma, malice, ego, or even loneliness; it hardly matters.
People are drawn in by stories of fabulists for many reasons: to watch the supposedly wise and savvy look foolish, or even just the car-crash attraction of untreated psychological disorders. But I think that every one of these stories has an element of tragedy at its core. These are people with rare gifts that have been squandered, compelled to live outside their means in the most extreme ways.
I’m far more cautious now around other people, but given the right circumstances–the need for validation or intimacy or to banish loneliness, I cannot say that I could resist another orbital capture. Nor could many others like me, I imagine.
* Franklin Foer’s NYT piece on Muth is also worth reading for its references to Washington’s rich history of fabulists, including Edward J. von Kloberg III and Craig Spence.
