Norma Khouri unravelled

Norma Khouri took us all in, hook, line and sinker. But what reason did we have to suspect that she was not telling the truth when she emerged as the author of Forbidden Love, (Honor Lost in the US), the emotional expose of honour killings in Jordan?

We brought her to our city as our guest to celebrate her courage in writing the book, promoting it as a Big Book Club selection, providing discount coupons to make it easier for our readers to afford. We invited the city to meet her - and they came in numbers so large that we had to open the huge Hilton Hotel ballroom to its maximum size and still had people standing.

I introduced her to that sea of people in a paeon of praise - as a woman fearlessly championing a cause.
On meeting Norma, I had been entirely charmed. She was modest, amusing, self-deprecatory and, above all, passionate about her cause. I will admit, however, that I had earlier found it necessary to quiz her in a way that I would not usually do in the course of an author interview. I had found some strange discrepancies in her book and wanted to clear them up. I could not, for example, understand the why and how of her move to Greece. When I asked about this she answered at some length with such fluency and ease that it was not until I went back over my notes that I realised that there had been no actual answer in her words. I had thought I heard an answer, but it was a charming zig-zag. There was no "there" there. I was more annoyed with myself than with her. How come I still had no answer to such a simple question? Now I would have to write around it - "when in doubt, leave it out". But that was not the only puzzle. On first speaking to her, I exclaimed at her American accent. I'd never met a Jordanian with such a strong American accent. "How much time had she spent in the US?", I asked. She gave a long response in which she attributed her accent to the American School in Amman, a diet of American movies and television and a passion for emulation. I could only comment at how well she had mastered the accent - for, I had no reason to suspect that she was not on the level. None of us did.

I suppose the thing that convinced me about Norma Khouri's authenticity in writing Forbidden Love was how bad she is as a writer. The book's text is simplistic in style, clearly put together by someone who is trying to tell a story but who has absolutely no talent as a writer.
And, of course, the book's cover brandished the promise that it was, indeed, a "true story". One tends to trust the Random House label. No, we had no cause for suspicion.

It was Sydney journalist Malcolm Knox who smelled the proverbial rat, and we all went into shock. His revelations reverberated around Australia, where Khouri had been living in high secrecy - to protect her from jihad, or so she told me when first I reached her on a super secret phone number.

Malcolm Knox, in a fine piece of investigative journalism, discovered that she is not only Chicago-raised but also allegedly wanted by the FBI for swindling an elderly woman in Chicago. She turns out to be married with two children.

Wrote Knox:
"Khouri's hoax will take its place in a long Australian tradition of literary fraud, from Ern Malley to Helen Darville-Demidenko. But no other fraudulent book has had such wide sales or impact..."

Many pennies dropped about Khouri's inconsistencies when I read this, but I still wondered. It all seemed so odd to fake with altruistic intent. After all, her mission was to shame the tradition of Islamic honour-killings - to save young women from death at the hand of their families. And, frankly, I could not dislike Khouri.

Now at the Adelaide Film Festival a documentary on Khouri and her story as a fake has its world premiere. Forbidden Lies allows Khouri to tell her own story to camera and then accompanies her to Jordan where she promises to prove that her friend Dalia was a real person who was genuinely killed by her brother because of her association with a young Christian man. But, come Jordan, Khouri is suddenly backpedalling and fudging. She cannot find those promised locations and there is no record of the victim ever ending up in any morgue or cemetery. Under the cool gaze of the camera, we watch Khouri unravelling, coming up with sequential excuses and layers of desperately transparent lies. Oddly, it is really sad. But she has chutzpah. Denying the swindling allegations, she creates a whole new story in which she casts herself as the victim - and we discover a new book is on the way, an autobiography of an abused child whose only way of coping with life is by inventing it...
What a pity we don't believe her.
But somewhere, somehow, we still like her.

Sweet mystery of history

What a strange position. Quite wonderful, but oddly unnerving. The National Library of Australia is touring an exhibition of Australian Treasures held in library collections - symbolising the way in which libraries are curators of the national heritage. I'd had an email from a State Library archivist alerting me to the arrival of an anonymously-donated scrap book containing clippings about the Ern Malley saga of the early 1940s - the famous literary hoax perpetrated against my father, Max Harris. The archivist invited me to have a look at the book, to see if I could help to shed light on it. As it happened, I had also been invited to the media preview of the Treasures exhibition so I liaised to see the scrapbook between the official Treasures speeches and the VIP lunch.

And so it came to pass that, while celebrating the way in which significant pieces of history survive the often inauspicious happenstances of time, I found myself with one such piece of history in my hands. A piece of Australian cultural history which also was celebrated within the context of the Treasures exhibition. Indeed, Ern Malley is even on the cover of the exhibition's big, glossy catalogue. And there I was, upstairs with the archivist, handling the fragile, browning pages of a 1941 clippings book, seeing reports that I had never seen before on that piece of history and, with Neil Thomas, the archivist, puzzling over where this thing has been for all these years, how it ended up in Angelsea, Victoria, why it was sent to the library anonymously and who on earth had compiled it.

This was a profoundly thrilling experience. With a rush, it made me realise that archivists have the most fascinating jobs. And for me, as the connected person called in to throw light on the find, there was a sense of love, sorrow, wonderment as I leafed very carefully through those fraying old pages which revealed, in unprecented detail, the dramas of my father's life. How painful they must have been for that very young man - all those screaming headlines, all those excoriating reviews.

At the same time, there was a sense of relief because so much of this history had been lost or in fragments here and there. My father kept nothing. He was a dedicated discarder. A biographer's nightmare. Yet here was a collection of clippings which encompassed media coverage in journals large and small, from all over the world. Beautifully collected and collated.

The tiny handwriting identifying sources was another mystery. It looked vaguely like Max's script, but not quite. So whose was it?

I phoned my mother and asked if there was any chance Max had ever made a clippings scrapbook. She replied that this would have been atypical. In all the years she knew him, he had never scrapbooked anything. She had known him from school days - so this, one could accept as fairly definitive. It was not he.

Puzzling at night with my mother, it was not until I had described the scrapbook's cardboard binding that some sort of penny dropped. "Mary did it," she said. Aaah. Mary Martin, my father's long-time friend and business partner, she who stayed in Adelaide and managed the Angry Penguins journal office while Max was in Melbourne producing it with John Reed.

And so the bits of jigsaw slip into place.

There is so much more to know.

How did this book get to Victoria? Was it among Mary's possessions, dispersed in her family after her death over 30 years ago? If so, why did the family keep it and now, why give it to history? And why do so anonymously?

Such are the mysteries we may never solve.

But at least the treasure is now in the right place - under the protective wing of librarians, the wonderful keepers of the cultural history.