In the latest episiode of "Authors Behaving Badly," the New York Times reports on some plagiarism by Neale Donald Walsch, the writer whose titles include Conversations with God and Happier than God. In a December post on his Beliefnet blog, Walsch detailed a charming tale about his child's school Christmas pageant. Problem was, the story had been published years earlier by Candy Chand.

Here's how Walsch explains it on his blog: All I can say now -- because I am truly mystified and taken aback by this -- is that someone must have sent it to me over the internet ten years or so ago. Finding it utterly charming and its message indelible, I must have clipped and pasted it into my file of "stories to tell that have a message I want to share." I have told the story verbally so many times over the years that I had it memorized...and then, somewhere along the way, internalized it as my own experience. I am aghast at how improbable this sounds, even to me, yet I can find no other explanation for how this story came out of my mouth in Candy Chand's words.

Hey, my memory can be spotty -- I have a hard time with my neighbors' names even though I can recite the 1969 N.Y. Mets lineup. Still, I don't think I would confuse an event involving my own child. It's worrisome that this troubling episode comes amid another controversy over Angel at the Fence, a Holocaust memoir canceled because part of it was fabricated.

Can't you trust anything you read these days? I don't know whether you're less likely to read memoirs -- or believe them -- but I sure am.

Photo from Beliefnet