"It's very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn't have any money or heat and we completely bought into that," McGrath told the newspaper.
McGrath, whom the paper identified as the daughter of former New York Times book review editor and current writer-at-large Charles McGrath, characterized the deception as "a huge personal betrayal" and "a professional one."
"Love and Consequences" drew admiring reviews from critics. Los Angeles Times book reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds on Feb. 10 cited "her loyalty to the language, the sense of community, the tight bonds she formed with her gang."
The review told of how "at 5, Margaret B. Jones, part white, part Native American, was taken from her suburban Southern California home after she came to school bleeding from what the teachers and social workers assumed was a sexual assault. She spent three years in foster care before landing with 'Big Mom,' a hard-working black woman raising four grandchildren in South-Central Los Angeles. It didn't take Jones long to fall in with the Bloods, the dominant gang in her neighborhood."
The reviewer told of how the book described "Jones" selling drugs at age 12 because she was "eager to earn my own money toward the flame-red Nike Cortez with fat laces that everyone else wore, but even more excited to prove myself worthy of wearing the affiliated color and moving up the ranks."
Seltzer told the New York Times that although the personal story told in the book was fabricated, other details were based on friends' real experiences. She insisted to the paper that she wrote the book at a Starbucks coffeehouse in South L.A.
"I just felt there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it," she said.
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bob.pool@latimes.com
rebecca.trounson@latimes.com
