This bestseller chronicles the visions of heaven seen by six-year-old Alex Malarkey following a car accident that left him in a coma for two months in 2004. In the book, an angel carries Malarkey to the gates of Heaven, where he meets Jesus, God, and the devil. But as a teenager, Malarkey changed his tune, beginning with the following comment on a fan page dedicated to the book: “1 of the most deceptive books ever.” Later he would explain, “I did not die. I did not go to Heaven. I said I went to heaven because I thought it would get me attention.”

This famous memoir by a girl who abandoned her adoptive family in 1941 to find her Nazi-deported biological parents — running with wolves, trekking 1,900 miles through Nazi-occupied Europe, and murdering a rapist German soldier during her four-year search — was, it turns out, not only made up but not even by a Jewish author. Monique de Wael, the Catholic daughter of resistance fighters who were indeed killed by Nazis, claimed that the story was not “the true reality, but it is my reality. There are times when I find it difficult to differentiate between reality and my inner world.” It’s an expensive problem to have: in 2014, de Wael was ordered by the courts to pay back $22.5 million in damages.

This memoir, made famous by Oprah Winfrey, opens with 23-year-old alcoholic and crack addict James Frey flying to Chicago with no recollection of how he got on the plane. What follows is an account of an agonizing rehabilitation experience — one particularly vivid scene finds Frey forced to undergo a root canal without any potentially relapse-inducing painkillers — redeemed by Frey’s romance with a fellow drug addict, Lilly. But as the book gained attention, critics also began to question its veracity, and a 2006 investigation revealed numerous lies and exaggerations. Frey blamed his “demons” for the untruths, but that did not stop Oprah from castigating him on her talk show: “I feel that you betrayed millions of readers,” she said.