Tuesday's revelation that a critically acclaimed memoir of gang life in South Los Angeles was an elaborate hoax raises troubling questions about the economics of American publishing, about our collective deference to victims and about the paucity of real literature based on our most urgent urban experiences.
"Love and Consequences" was published last week to favorable reviews. Its author, Margaret B. Jones, was purported to be a young woman of mixed Caucasian and Native American ancestry who grew up in the care of an African American foster mother in South L.A. Jones wrote of how her black foster brothers joined the Bloods street gang at 11 and 13 and described how one was shot dead by the rival Crips in front of her foster home. Jones recounted her own activities as a drug courier for the Bloods, how she received her first gun as a 14th birthday present and, most chillingly, how she used her first substantial drug profits to buy a burial plot.
It's pretty gripping stuff. Earlier this week, however, the New York Times revealed that Jones is, in fact, Margaret Seltzer, a 33-year-old white woman and creative writing student who grew up in Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, an exclusive private Episcopal school in the Valley.
Seltzer/Jones' fraud is bound to evoke memories of James Frey's notoriously concocted memoir of drug addiction and imprisonment, "A Million Little Pieces," which chat diva Oprah Winfrey turned into a national bestseller. And it comes just days after Misha Defonseca, author of "Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years," admitted that her bestselling book about her childhood also was fabricated. We easily could expand the list, but the question is: Why all this fraud now?
One reason has to do with public taste. In the United States and, increasingly, in parts of Western Europe, the only unchallenged moral authority has become that of victims. This should not be read as an expression of sympathy toward the injured; instead, it's really an extension of the culture of narcissism's influence into the world of letters. It's a view that asserts that only those who have experienced pain or torment have a right speak of it, though others may participate vicariously through their eyes. Hence our insatiable desire for tell-all memoirs of every savage and degrading form of abuse -- as long as the account comes directly from those who suffered it.
