The publication of Great and Unfortunate Things, a book title with sonorous undertones, is scheduled to go ahead imminently. After all, Simon and Schuster, who acquired it from the now-exited Cambridge academic, Jason Arday, have promised it is unlike any other memoir. That bit we can believe. But whether Arday’s memoir should be moved from the non-fiction to the fiction category is a question which looms awkwardly.
The tale is based on some aspects of the life of a young man from a Ghanaian background in south London which are grounded in reality: growing up on a council estate, diagnosed with autism and global developmental delay, outraged by incidences of racism – and rising through academia specialising in the sociology of education.
The problem for his publishers is that as doubts spread about Arday’s alleged plagiarism and a slew of Walter Mitty claims about university appointments, light scrutiny of his output, heroic charitable achievements which have fallen apart on simple fact-checks and tall tales of his triumph over a worryingly large series of extreme health conditions.
The publisher last year removed some of the more dramatic statements from Arday’s author page, including the Herculean claim that he has run “30 marathons in 35 days, 300 miles in three days and 600 miles in six days” and that he has raised “over £5.5m for 80 national charities”.
