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.
Tags: fabulists, forgery, john w. thompson, lies, plagiarism, relationships, the hipster grifter
This is
fascinating and unsettling.
In mulling over drafts I went back through my old email account and found correspondence with her, even back to the message I sent her after the day we met (I was too shy to call her). I also found the only photos I had of her, which she had told me to destroy, but I had apparently forgotten that gmail saves copies of sent messages. There’s a story behind those. There are lots of stories.
It was a strange feeling, once I knew, like I’d been given fool’s gold. She was amazing in a lot of ways, and I’m grateful to her, but I don’t miss her.
Reading this (and the links to other fabulist lit), I am profoundly grateful to have never known a fabulist.*
*oh god what if they’re just really really good at what they do I might never know I am pretty gullible O.O
This is great! I think everyone falls in with a Fabulist at one point in time
I’ve definitely known liars; I don’t know that I’ve known a Fabulist yet. Or if I did, they were very very good. I had a friend in high school who told everyone all sorts of outrageous lies (including being a werewolf) but nobody believed him in the slightest, so that’s not the same thing.
This is good and interesting and thoughtful, dude.
I’ve met a lot people who have lied out of shame, like the guys who are fired from their jobs and then go out and sit in their cars all day to hide that fact from their families. But it seems that for the most part the liars we recognize are those driven by impulse and petty insecurities. They can’t help but “do one better”, and that’s what makes them transparent. If you accomplished something, they did so on a greater scale. If you’ve met a celebrity, they remember a time they were invited to their house, etc. It’s hard not to feel a little sorry for those people.
And thank you 🙂
I have known one person like this. We were in junior high together, and she claimed to be a literal NINJA. Like, she would come to sleepovers and then sneak out in the middle of the night with her (fake, souvenir) “samurai sword” to do battle with shadowy and mysterious enemies. She would come back with bruises and shallow cuts. We all believed her, and to this day I don’t know for sure why. I mean, we were sheltered kids living in a bible-belt area, but we weren’t complete morons. I guess it was because she was so beautiful and interesting, and our boring lives were so enriched by her pleasant fiction that it would have cost us more to call her out, and potentially lose her friendship, than to just keep rolling with it.
I knew a junior-high fabulist as well. She has grown into a lovely human being, so I assume it was just a part of her being an adolescent with a tough life, but falling for her lies about her elaborate love life and awesome travels makes me wary about extra-special-seeming people now.
I have a feeling that a lot of people do that in junior high, and then turn out completely normal after. I am not in touch with my ninja friend any more, but I imagine she turned out fine.
I am interested in whether or not fabulists ever believe their own lies. I think my friend really did think she was a ninja. Maybe there is some kind of breakdown in the border between fantasy and reality when you are that young. I mean, toddlers literally do not understand the difference between truth and make believe, which is why they tell hilarious lies all the time. Maybe in some people that part of the brain is slow to catch up to the rest of us?
I think you are right, that sometimes they don’t quite grasp that they are lying–and that’s why they’re so good at selling those lies. I suspect adult fabulists are at least pretty emotionally stunted.
A guy I went to high school with also claimed to be a ninja! He brought his swords in for a talent show and waved them around for a while to a Wu Tang song. He claimed other ninjas had killed his father.
I wonder if all the ninja highschoolers are a different breed nowadays–vampires? Whatever “exotic” thing is cool at the moment?
(Yes, I know ninjas are a real thing and vampires are not, but to young white kids they are equally exciting and improbable, thanks to naivety and casual racism).
Lycanthropes are timeless.
Oh, this guy was black, actually. Which doesn’t mean ninjas were somehow a commonplace for him or not “exotic,” so it doesn’t undercut your point. Sometimes, though, people online use “white” as a bashful shorthand for middle class or whatever, and that’s not necessarily the best idea.
Maybe kids today are otherkin!
True! I apologize for not making it clearer that I was referring to my background and high school experience specifically; I definitely meant white (and not middle class–I wish that described my high school experience, haha) but I can see how white in that context comes across as shorthand for “your average kid” which is definitely a problem. I will be more careful next time.
Oh, otherkin! Now that you mention it, I bet if I was a teenager now, all that time I spent on elfwood.com uploading drawings of faeries would be replaced with arguing about the exact nature of my inner red panda on tumblr. Yet another opportunity to be grateful that social media didn’t exist when I was in high school. (Missed it by, like, three years. Phew!)
What is it with Junior High that makes us come up with ridiculous fabrications? I had a fabulist then too. Her stories were completely ridiculous, and yet, I totally believed it.
<3 John!! This turned out great.
Thank you! It was long in the making, heh.
And I’ve been a big jerk and didn’t even send my critique, but it looks like you didn’t need it! (I also just booked my ticket to Denver this morning!)
Don’t worry about it! Mallory provided all needed guidance. Given how purple my prose can get it it’s a wonder she wrested something so readable out of it.
And yes, come and see us! What days will you be here? Might be a task to get our Denver folk organized both here and at the HP but we will think of something and if nothing else, I can show you around town a bit 🙂
September 1-8! Both my friend and my cousin (and her husband) will have to work, so if you have any free time during the week, I’ll be around! Pretty much the only thing I have to do every time I’m in Denver is buy a book from the Tattered Cover.
Meet me in the Cocktail thread later!
“an all-purpose kindred spirit” – that’s what got me.
That was really well written. I like the houseplant line in your blurb. Cheers!
Thanks!
This is making me want to re-read The Robber Bride!
I remember having a big and vivid fantasy life as a young child. If I hadn’t been instilled with such a huge, crippling reliance on honesty, I would have been the fabulist. A combination of a mind full of fantasy plus deep self-loathing makes you ‘tell stories’ to be more interesting.
I always pulled back, before the last.
But I have now known so many. Something about me attracts them. I don’t know why – because of my own tendencies in that reaction I don’t really fall for that. There’s a certain theatre to everything they do that is obvious if you did it (as a rank amateur) yourself.
They’re everwhere online. Especially in close-knit forums and other communities. Thos communities are destroyed when it all comes out. But it’s easier to do it online. You don’t have to do a lot of the run-around fakery.
They’re fascinating, really. How they do it and why people are so keen to believe them. While they’re there, there’s a magic. When they’re gone you just feel like a sap.
Beautifully put 🙂
This was an uncanny read. As I went, I swore I knew Len. This was before the words “mountain” and “Colorado” cued me in. By the time I got to your bio (re: CU-Denver) and, later downthread, the bit about the spontaneous trip to busk in Boulder, I had worked myself out of the shock of recognition.
Just matured mightily in the last eight minutes and dragged my cursor over a whole mess of stuff. In short, I met a lot of fabulists when I lived in Colorado.
I’m in Denver now but this was in Fort Collins, and the whole period of our friendship was about ’07-’09. I definitely recognize them more often now, but none of them have been quite like Len.
Oh
Excellent piece of writing. Did I tell you of the embezzler that I had for a client? Based on your article, I think that the embezzler shares some of the psychiatric malfunction with the fabulist. My client stole money from his employer, not for security, or to pay off a loan shark, or anything so pedestrian. He entertained his fellow employees with the employer’s money. Fabulously. He bought one woman a new BMW, and something else for someone else. He said that it was family money.
Lycanthropes are timeless.
When I was in elementary school, I’d tell my classmates improbable things like “I’m moving to Cleveland at the end of the month,” just to see if they’d believe me. I got a certain thrill out of lying convincingly enough to be believed. Or maybe just enjoyed teasing them for their gullibility (my alternate realities never lasted long). I don’t remember doing this very often, but there’s enough emotional memory left to almost get why someone would become a fabulist. I grew out of it, and don’t have to build myself up at others’ expense anymore, but it was an effective way for an insecure kid to feel better.
(By middle school everyone I knew assumed I was joking anytime I said anything outlandish or odd. The peril of revealing your tall tales! But they were mostly right, so I guess that’s fair.)
When I was in elementary school, I'd tell my classmates improbable things like "I'm moving to Cleveland at the end of the month," just to see if they'd believe me. I got a certain thrill out of lying convincingly enough to be believed. Or maybe just enjoyed teasing them for their gullibility (my alternate realities never lasted long). I don't remember doing this very often, but there's enough emotional memory left to almost get why someone would become a fabulist. I grew out of it, and don't have to build myself up at others' expense anymore, but it was an effective way for an insecure kid to feel better.
(By middle school everyone I knew assumed I was joking anytime I said anything outlandish or odd. The peril of revealing your tall tales! But they were mostly right, so I guess that's fair.)
'When we would have our heart-to-hearts she would sneak us up to the rooftops of parking structures or go out to the edge of the frozen town reservoir, these very cinematic places, to have very direct emotional dialogues. Thinking back on it, it seems like theater, which is frightening to me. I can't really tell how hard I was played.'
This rings so true for me. I think a lot of people like this are stars in their own inner movie.
What is it with Junior High that makes us come up with ridiculous fabrications? I had a fabulist then too. Her stories were completely ridiculous, and yet, I totally believed it.
I went to college with a girl who all of our mutual friends suspect of being a fabulist. I'm still trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, years later. I alternately feel like a bad person for doubting her, and like a gullible fool for believing her.
It's just that so many of her probably-lies are so tragic. How do you tell someone, "Bullshit! You don't have a dead brother, you would've mentioned him by now," without being total jerk? You don't.