Read 'em and Weep: Those 'True' Stories

The genre of confessions magazines was invented in 1919 by Bernarr Macfadden, the looniest American nut job ever to become a millionaire magazine publisher. A health faddist from Arkansas, Macfadden believed in the therapeutic powers of walking barefoot, standing on your head and "exercising" your hair by pulling on it twice a day. He founded his first magazine, Physical Culture, in 1899. A crackpot health mag, it once published an article titled "Why I Adopted Grass as a Diet" and illustrated it with a picture of the author wearing a tuxedo and grazing in a pasture.

Naturally, it was a huge success, selling 500,000 copies an issue by 1919, when Macfadden founded True Stories, a magazine devoted to first-person pieces, usually tales of star-crossed love, with such titles as "I Was a Child Wife." The mag offered $1,000 for true stories from readers. That offer inspired readers to send in true stories, some of them quite good. It also inspired cynical professional writers to send in fake true stories, some of them even better.

Within a decade, True Story was selling 2 million copies an issue, and its success had spawned many copycats: True Confessions, True Romance, True Experience. After World War II, these mags began to fade in popularity, but they never died.

Today, Dorchester Media -- publisher of True Story, True Confessions, True Romance, True Experience and Black Confessions -- sells about a million copies a month, about half of them by subscription, says John C. Prebich, Dorchester's CEO. The main audience, he says, is older women living in rural America.

"A typical reader that I hear from will say she's from Oklahoma and she's maybe 51 and the mother of four kids," Prebich says. "She'll say: 'I started reading them when I was 12. I'd steal my mother's copy because it was a little risque.' And she'll say, 'For me, it's therapy. I know I'm not alone. I'm not unusual. Most people have these problems.' "

Good God, I hope that's not true! Quick, somebody please tell me that most Americans don't suffer from the problems that the anonymous authors of these tales recount! These women -- nearly all the stories are narrated by women -- endure unspeakable and absurd horrors.

In True Experience, a bus driver's addiction to redecorating her house keeps her up so late at night that she falls asleep at the wheel of her school bus and causes a horrendous accident.

In True Confessions, a woman's husband becomes a successful gigolo, and she loves it because he buys her nice things, but then he quits because he has fallen in love with another woman, who disapproves of his profession.

In Black Confessions, a woman is imprisoned for stabbing her abusive boyfriend and learns the valuable lesson that "There's No Spring Break in Jail."

These mags would be depressing except that the plucky heroines inevitably rise above these tragedies and become better, stronger people. Even the woman in True Confessions who left her husband and seven kids to live in a log cabin with a studly Amish man finally went back home, pregnant but wiser.

How true are these stories? It depends on whom you ask.

"They're true stories," Prebich insists. "It may not have happened to [the writers], but it was relayed to them."

"Writers write based on their own experience or the experience of people they know or based on something they read in the newspaper," says Nell Miller, who edits True Romance and True Experience.

In other words, these stories are fiction, although there may be some factual material buried in there somewhere. "Truthiness," as Stephen Colbert would say.

Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's the method employed by Shakespeare and Steinbeck and Jacqueline Susann and all the other great names of literature.

True or merely truish, the best of these stories have the feel of life as it's really lived in America. A distraught woman flees to the solitude of a bathroom stall so she can weep in private. A mother gets a shower curtain and "a matching burgundy rug" for Christmas. An imprisoned woman describes the other students in her GED class -- "the girl who stabbed her boyfriend, a couple of old prostitutes, some shoplifters and the girl who sucks her thumb."

And that bus driver -- the one who became addicted to home decorating -- reveals her moment of epiphany: "We were right in the middle of making trivets out of Popsicle sticks when I suddenly knew my purpose."

Her purpose in life, she decided at that moment, was to become an art therapist.

Even Shakespeare couldn't make that up.