Looks like James Frey isn’t the only writer making stuff up.

The publisher of two memoirs by Nasdijj, an award-winning Navajo author whose identity has been strongly challenged, said Friday that it would no longer ship his books and would accept returns of copies from book sellers.

“This looks pretty conclusive,” Ballantine spokeswoman Carol Schneider said after The News and Observer of Raleigh, N.C., reported Friday that Nasdijj‘s Social Security number matched the number of a white man, Timothy P. Barrus, who had a prior career writing gay pornography.

Wow. Next we’ll find out that Wonkette isn’t really an anal-sex obsessed redheaded tart, but an anal-sex obsessed assistant prosecutor or something like that.

Jim: I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that Frey isn’t the only big name memoirist found to have stretched the truth, and/or made stuff up.

I think my all time favorite was Robert Reich’s Locked in the Cabinet, which as Jonathan Rauch revealed in Slate, was full of doctored quotes, “mis-remembered” events, and accounts of Washington hearings and press conferences that don’t jive at all with records like C-SPAN’s videotapes. That fight is worth remembering, because Robert Reich, much as I may disagree with his politics or economic views, always seemed like a nice, decent guy. And then we learned, when it came to his memoir, Reich was willing to invent anecdote after anecdote painting his opponents as craven and corrupt, and himself dedicated and principled, and then chalk it all up to a “differing memories” in the ensuing brouhaha.

I trust Reich’s accounts about as far as I can throw him. Actually, less, since Reich is a twerp and I could probably throw him pretty far.