Journalist and writer Vivian Gornick (author of The Situation and The Story.) recently admitted, while conducting seminar at Goucher College, that she had invented some of the incidents she "recalled" in her memoirconversations with her mother and a street person who didn't exist, among them. Perhaps more shockingly, seminar attendees also reported that she admitted to using "composite characters" while reporting for the Village Voice. (The current editor, Don Forst, says that if she did it while in his employ, "that would be the end of it.") Fictionalized memoirs are one thing, but fictionalized reporting is quite another. Gornick seems to have confused telling the story with telling a story.
Confessions of a memoirist [Salon]