Navajo life, or just pale-faced lie?

Former Chapel Hill author Nasdijj won national acclaim writing memoirs about his brutal childhood as a Navajo Indian in the Southwest and as a father to two adopted sons who died of AIDS and fetal alcohol syndrome.

In truth, he was Timothy P. Barrus, a man of Scandinavian descent who grew up in a solidly middle-class neighborhood of Lansing, Mich., and had a career writing gay pornography, according to public records and several people who know Barrus.

The likelihood that Barrus had fabricated his past -- and parlayed the fiction into three successful nonfiction books -- was first raised Wednesday in a lengthy article in a Los Angeles newspaper that outlined similarities between Barrus and Nasdijj.

On Thursday, The News & Observer was able to confirm that they are the same person. The paper had a Social Security number for Nasdijj because it had paid him for free-lance work. A check of the database of public records collected by Accurint, a private company, matched Barrus to the Social Security number. And an Esquire editor said the magazine had made out a check to "Tim Nasdijj Barrus" for the 1999 article that was the author's breakthrough piece.

Barrus, 55, couldn't be located and did not respond to an e-mail request for an interview. Nor did his wife and adult daughter.

The revelation comes at a time when the publishing world is grappling with the disclosure that memoirist James Frey took liberties with his best-selling book, "A Million Little Pieces." But while Frey embellished parts of his life, Barrus appears to have made up an entirely new one.

"It's different from Frey," said Esquire magazine editor-in-chief David Granger. "Frey exaggerated. If true, this is made up from whole cloth."

Granger said in an interview that the magazine discovered Thursday that it had made a check out to "Tim Nasdijj Barrus" for the writer's article about Tommy Nothing Fancy, his supposedly adopted son. The article was a finalist for a National Magazine Award, and it led to a book contract.

Granger said the magazine is unsure what to do until the facts are sorted out further.

"We have no idea if any parts of the story are true," Granger said. "We can't determine if he's not Native American -- we don't know."

Publisher 'disturbed'

Carol Schneider, a spokeswoman for Ballantine, which published two of Nasdijj's books, was in the same boat.

"We are disturbed," she said. "We would be very unhappy to be part of this if, in fact, that's all true."

Ballantine broke off its relationship with the author in 2004. Schneider said it was not because of questions about his identity, but she wouldn't elaborate.

After the Esquire piece, Nasdijj published "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams" in 2000, followed by "The Boy and His Dog Are Sleeping" -- which won a PEN award -- and "Geronimo's Bones." He wrote that he was the son of an alcoholic Navajo mother and a white cowboy father who raped and beat him. He said he grew up in migrant labor camps.

His former brother-in-law, Stephen Cheetham of Lansing, said Barrus had no such life. Cheetham said he hadn't seen Barrus since the 1970s, but over the years his two children told him what they heard of Barrus from their mother.

"I had heard that he was writing stories under different names," Cheetham said Thursday. "Something about how he claimed to be a Vietnam veteran at one point, claimed to be a Native American Indian at another point.

"His parents were a very middle-class, working, typical American family. He was never involved in Vietnam, he was never a Native American Indian, his parents weren't Native Americans -- there wasn't anything like that in his past."