Fake memoir of L.A. gangs and poverty pulled from shelves
Last Updated: Tuesday, March 4, 2008 | 2:58 PM ET
CBC News
A memoir about the violent underworld of Los Angeles, Love and Consequences, has been pulled from the bookstores by its publisher after it turned out to be fabricated.
The story tells of a half-white, half-native American girl raised in poverty by a black foster mother, who turns early in her life to selling drugs for a local gang in south-central Los Angeles.
But the author, who wrote under the name Margaret B. Jones, is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, a white woman who grew up in a well-to-do Sherman Oaks, Calif., family and attended private school.
Seltzer, 33, said she wrote the book to draw attention to problems of gang violence in L.A., basing it on the stories of friends.
"For whatever reason, I was really torn, and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to," Seltzer told the New York Times.
"I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
Riverhead Books, an imprint of Penguin Group USA, published Love and Consequences just last week, but now has pulled the book and cancelled the author's book tour.
Sister blew whistle
Seltzer was outed by her sister, Cyndi Hoffman, who contacted Riverhead Books after reading an article about the book in the New York Times.
Hoffman said she believed editors at Riverhead should have done a better job checking up on the story.
This is one of a string of scandals involving fake memoirs, including James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, a memoir of drug addiction that proved to be fabricated, and Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years, a fabricated Holocaust memoir by Belgian writer Misha Defonseca.
But the editor who worked with Seltzer, Sarah McGrath, said she believed the story.
"I've been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years, and her story never has changed," McGrath said. "All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks."
She described the revelation that the memoir was fake as a "huge personal and professional betrayal."
In Love and Consequences, Jones describes the shooting death of an African-American foster brother and gang recruitment and widespread access to guns among children in their early teens.
She also described being raised by a character she called Big Mom, who took in four grandchildren in addition to her foster children.
The incendiary stories drew the attention of reviewers, with one describing it as a "humane and deeply affecting memoir."
Seltzer actually was raised by her biological family, but said she met gang members and stayed in touch with them when she was living in Los Angeles.
In the author's note to the book she says she "combined characters and changed names, dates and places."
With files from the Associated Press
