Maybe, like me, you spent a little bit of your Thanksgiving reading about a bizarre and aggressive feud between two people on an airplane. Or maybe you were aghast when you read a powerful essay on being poor. Or maybe you felt a bit weird reading that kid’s Amazon-friendly letter to Santa.

If so, the chances are that you later discovered that actually you weren’t doing any of those things: you were actually reading a kind of online fiction.

There was no woman in seat 7A. There was no kid, just a comedian. And that $60,000 raised to help lift that writer out of the poverty she described? It’s complicated.

Were these stories hoaxes? Or are they (as the authors all seem to argue) just fictions that got out of control? You can decide where you draw the line, but here are two facts I’ll give you for free: none of these stories were really true, and none of the authors admitted it until they were caught.