My Life as a Fake

My Life as a Fake is a 2003 novel by Australian writer Peter Carey based on the Ern Malley hoax of 1943, in which two poets created a fictitious poet, Ern Malley, and submitted poems in his name to the literary magazine Angry Penguins. The novel was inspired by the idea of "a 24-year-old hoax brought to life - original, angry, multilingual, learned. He was interested in what the being would know instinctively and what he would be ignorant of. How would the creator deal with his creation, and the creation with his creator?" He realised as he was writing the book that he was not interested in... James McAuley and Harold Stewart who perpetrated the hoax but in "magical thinking". It is told as a first-person narrative from the point of view of a young woman editing a literary magazine, and is presented as her account of her encounter with the perpetrator of the hoax after many years. However, it was originally written in the voice of "the created being". Carey takes a number of significant liberties in his novelization, not the least of which is his decision to make the Ern Malley counterpart an actual person who ends up haunting his "creator.
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