If you were a chronic and incurable pathological liar, would you write a memoir?

That’s the biggest question I have after watching Misha AND THE WOLVES on Netflix. It’s a documentary about a bizarre Belgian woman, Misha Defonseca, who claimed she’d lived in the woods with a pack of wolves during the Second World War. She wrote a book about her experiences decades later — except they weren’t really her experiences. Her real story is probably more likely to be MISHA AND THE WOLVES SHE NEVER MET, unless perhaps she paid a childhood visit to a zoo.

Word is already out that her book was bullshit, but beyond saying that, I don’t want to give away the chilling particulars. The documentary is worth seeing and it will reveal everything that happened, not to mention everything else that didn’t.

You have to wonder about Misha. An interviewed relative says she was “always delusional,” but was she? It’s telling that she claimed to have one surname in the American version of her book yet deliberately used a different last name for the French edition. Did you know that Belgium has three official languages, Dutch, German and French? Misha was clearly aware that the French book was going to be made available in her native Belgium. Would a truly delusional person have the good sense to use a fake name in the French book while knowing it could be read by people in Belgium who would recognize her, and reveal her true story, had she used her real name?

Of course not!

That tells me Misha knew exactly what she was doing: perpetrating a colossal fraud..

Have you seen the documentary? What do you think?