What happens when you fact-check Michele Bachmann’s memoir?

Michele Bachmann has a new memoir coming out next week, and Mother Jones has an analysis of the new book, complete with a fact-check of the stories she shares there. I haven’t had a chance to get a copy myself, but from what Tim Murphy writes, it doesn’t hold much surprise for those who’ve been following Bachmann’s political career so far. It includes plenty of take-down of President Obama, as well as full-throttle with her faith background. But it’s the results of the fact-checking that shouldn’t surprise anyone, but I still found frustrating. Mother Jones reports:

There’s enough to dispute within the first 13 pages that by the time she announces, on page 14, that she was born in Waterloo, Iowa, you almost want to ask for a birth certificate.

The idea of memoir as fact is a contested one, and political memoirs are notorious for all sorts of spin (particularly ones released during a lagging presidential campaign). Bachmann followers, unfortunately, may take what she says as fact. Perhaps because Bachmann constantly reiterates that it is:

“My campaign plan is simple,” Bachmann writes, as she lays out an agenda to restore America to greatness. “I am going to say true things.”

Now that, we all know, is the not-so-truth, even without reading one more sentence of her memoir.