We live in an age when you don’t have to be a dignitary, famous celebrity or someone who survived tragedy to write your life’s story. In the past decade, blogs, Facebook and Twitter (to name a few) have given any person with a computer or cellphone the ability to create his own memoirs. Case in point: you wouldn’t be reading this review right now if I hadn’t started my own blog back in 2003, which led to Jeff Giles reading some of my ramblings and asking me to be a part of Popdose. In this era of immediate thoughts and short, succinct sentences, it was only matter of time before a writer took the approach of a blog entry or Twitter update to write their memoirs. Well, almost.

Jeff Martin, author of The Customer is Always Wrong: The Retail Chronicles (nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award) and a frequent contributor to National Public Radio, has written his fabricated memoirs, My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize (Soft Skull Press).

As Martin lays out in the author’s note, “Some of the events described almost happened as related, others were expanded and changed. Others were stretched from the smallest inkling of truth. Others were stolen from other memoirs.”  Right off the bat you know this is going to be a silly ride. This whimsical, quick read — it’s only 128 pages, none of which is a full page and including plenty of illustrations — brought me a smile and chuckle as it follows Martin’s “extraordinary” life from his birth in 1980 to the year 2061. Martin’s approach to his so-called life reminded me of Woody Allen’s Zelig and, more obviously, Forrest Gump: Martin is continuously present at some remarkable moments in pop culture history. Some examples: (more…)