The book's author, known as Misha Defonseca, who lives in the United States, made the admission to a Belgian newspaper weeks after the release of the hit Franco-Belgian film Survivre avec les loups (Surviving with Wolves).

The story tells of a young Jewish girl whose parents are seized and deported by the Nazi Gestapo in 1941.

She flees across Belgium, Germany and Poland with only wolves for company, adopting their ways and being accepted as part of the pack.

She miraculously travels 3,000 kilometres in search of her parents in a heart-rending Holocaust tale.

Except it didn't happen.

In her media confession to the Le Soir daily on Thursday, the author says her parents were indeed seized from Brussels during the war but that she subsequently stayed with a grandfather, then an uncle who treated her badly.

"It's true that I invented a life, a life that cut myself off from my family, a life far away from the people I detested," she adding in the statement under her real name Minique de Wael.

"There were times when it was difficult for me to tell the difference between what was the reality and what was happening in my interior universe."

"The book is a story, it's my story. It is not the true reality but it is my reality, my way of surviving".