Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy (Love and Consequences)

NY Times ^ | March 4, 2008 | MOTOKO RICH

[lowbridge]

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

[MuttTheHoople]

Darn, I was going to put her book right next to “The Hitler Diaries”.

[Hildy]

Another fake Native American memoir. After the James Frey debacle, there was a great article about this phenomenon. I’m going to try to find it and post it.

[lawnguy]

I'm no publishing expert, but wouldn't you do just a cursory background check on someone?

God only knows how many of these things are phony.

Also funny that this story is from the NYT, who've had their own problems with the truth :)

[Enchante]

She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.... "I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Another "fake but accurate" defence!! She should call upon Dan Blather and Mary Mapes to rush to her defence.

[M203M4]

“I’m not saying like I did it right,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I did not do it right. I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.”

Well of course you had to resort to fiction. Look lady, get career in journalism. Then you can write fiction but pass it along as relayed by "confidential sources", and weave all the left-wing self-loathing perpetual-victimhood whitey-made-me-do-it BS every day!

[I'm ALL Right!]

Couldn’t they just label it “Fiction” and sell it anyway?

[razorback-bert]

It wouldn't be critically acclaimed then.

[machogirl]

but it was soooooooooooooo noble

with libs, the ends always justifies the means

[FreeManWhoCan]

Has`anyone here ever seen Sherman Oaks the tv series from cable?

[Eagles6]

"Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca"

Check this link. It's worse if you can believe it.

[Zeppo]

The fawning NYT book review by Michiko Kakutani is here. The book excerpts in the review are so obviously and laughably larded with over-the-top cliches about life in the 'hood, you'd figure that any intelligent person might have figured out that they were fabrications - but since they were so closely aligned with so many liberal stereotypes, maybe nobody bothered to notice...

Kakutani does hint that it might not be all that it's cracked up to be with comments such as the following one, but nevertheless the review is done as a full-course meal, including the entire hook, line, and sinker:

Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood

[Pontiac]

Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

Did they meet this woman before they signed this Non-Fiction book deal?

You don’t get much more Caucasian than that.

[PzLdr]

“And this year’s winner of the Rigoberto Menschu award is...”

[wiseone]

Victimization-entitlement,it’s a cottage industry

[MrEdd]

That’s the problem with society now a days. Margaret Mead’s fabrication of “Coming of age in Samoa” didn’t get exposed for 50 years. Can’t a liberal fake a book anymore?

/jasonblair

[norton]

"Couldn’t they just label it “Fiction” and sell it anyway?"

Ooops!
Then it would be a racist attack on minority culture.

Can't have that, can we.

[ElkGroveDan]

Oh man. Another dingbat Valley Girl.

[ElkGroveDan]

Has`anyone here ever seen Sherman Oaks the tv series from cable?

No but I lived near there and know it first hand. It's ethnic alright, but oy vey a different kind of ethnic.

[JCG]

The documents are fake but the story is true.

    -- Dan Rather.

----

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