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A 33-year-old white woman from Sherman Oaks, now living in Eugene, Oregon, has made national headlines today as news comes that her memoir was largely fabricated. Last week, Margaret Seltzer who goes by the pen name Margaret B. Jones was featured in the New York Times' Home & Garden section in a fascinating story about her book, "Love and Consequences." One LAist reader explains her fascination about it in an e-mail:
I read the home section article twice, because it was just so bizarre and weird and compelling -- she said she was still a blood, she didn't know what "Big Mom" (so called foster grandmother) would think if she knew she might make a cookbook of her recipes, and her daughter was so cute!
Now, outed by her sister after the article came out, Jones has admitted that her memoir "about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles has admitted it was a work of fiction."
The author, "Margaret B. Jones," is actually Margaret Seltzer. Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley, the Los Angeles Times reported.Seltzer's admission that her persona was made up came in a tearful-toned mea culpa to the New York Times, which last week published a profile of Seltzer using her pseudonym. It was accompanied by a photograph of the 33-year-old and her 8-year-old daughter in Eugene, Ore., where they now live. [NBC4]
The book's publisher, Riverhead Books, has withdrawn the book and the tour scheduled to begin today has been canceled.
To all this, local blogger Andrew at Here in Van Nuys says the tour has only begun: "No doubt, this incident will earn her great respect in Hollywood and open a future of lucrative job offers pouring in from Malibu and Beverly Hills....."
Learn more about where the author grew up in our Neighborhood Project featuring Sherman Oaks.
Book cover image from "Love and Consequences." Carrie Meathrell contributed to this story
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According to the NY Times article, Seltzer referrenced gang bangers as friends she knew from Grant high school. I've been gone for a while, but viewing Grant as a poverty stricken pool of turmoil seems laughably stupid to me.
It's a week of fakes. Robert Irvine of "Dinner:Impossible" fame was fired by the Food Network for embellishing his resume. Apparently he didn't cook for royalty and American presidents.
Apparrently, all you have to do to get a book deal is waltz into a publisher's office and tell them you have a great idea for a memoir and they'll sign you right up. Jeez. And this is just a week after a woman who wrote a Holocaust memoir admitted she'd made up the whole goddamned thing.
Do publishing companies not understanding the concept of "vetting" and "fact checking"?
Meanwhile, I've got this great idea to write a book about my years as President of the United States.
I love when these things happen. Did you read about the one in the UK, "Wolf Woman"? There's a movie in the works based on her book about how she survived as a child among wolves to flee Nazis. Guess what?
"Meanwhile, I've got this great idea to write a book about my years as President of the United States."
Nah! Never fly Ross. You need to come up with something where you were born into poverty, wrote bad checks, pimped out your Moma, went to prison, pulled yourself up by you bootstraps, over came adversity, and THEN became Pez.
That kinda shit sells!!
Interesting to see these people get away with such things in books -- where it seems they'd immediately be debunked if they were written online.
While pseudonyms do fine in online publishing, faked identities and fiction sold as fact don't.
But in the world of corporate book publishing, it seems there's another James Frey, Margaret Jones, or jt leroy every six months or so.
Andy - You are SO right on about the print world vs. the online world. This kind of deceit would be called out in the online world well before someone wasted thousands (millions?) developing the book, printing the book and marketing it.
Blogs and online writers have a history of vetting anything online and it's a shame the publishing houses repeatedly fail to do the basic checking that would be required to suss this out quite easily.
I wonder how this will play at her reading Thursday night at Vroman's. Will it be her? Someone else pretending to be her? Or...will it be cancelled?
Surprise, surprise -- thursday at Vroman's has been cancelled.
Damn it, you're right jrb.
However, that doesn't mean I can't write about how, after serving the country in the first Gulf War, I became a heroin addicted chef in the seedy underbelly of Toronto, only to find redemption through my mastery of horse whispering. Sadly, after my prize horse died, I descended into a hellish addiciton to vicodin. Finally, I became the pope. And leader of the crips.
Well geeze Ross now yer talkin' miniseries.
As usual, to find the source of ethical pollution; follow the money trail. . . as long as it will sell truth is irrelevant. Rich people suck!