Why we fall for the fakes
Ironically, our appetite for 'reality' fare has created an audience for the phony memoir.
JUST when you thought it was safe to go back to the bookstore, there's a brand-new entry in the memoir-that-turns-out-to-be-fiction sweepstakes: "Love and Consequences" by the author formerly known as Margaret B. Jones, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer. Published to gushing reviews, the book has been recalled by its publisher, Riverhead, in the wake of revelations that "Margaret," rendered by Seltzer as a half-white, half-Native American woman raised in a series of foster homes in hard South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods, is purely the invention of the real-life author, who is white and grew up middle class in Sherman Oaks.
Seltzer has much in common with the growing literary liar's club that includes writers of both fiction and nonfiction. James Frey is, of course, the best known of these authors, having been excoriated by Oprah Winfrey before an audience of millions for having made up many of the shocking details in his addiction-and-recovery memoir, "A Million Little Pieces." There's also Laura Albert, who posed as the "autobiographical novelist" (and street hustling drug addict) JT LeRoy, and has remained completely unapologetic about the deception. And let's not forget the lesser-known but equally troubling case of "Nasdijj," the "Navajo" author of "The Blood Runs Like a River Through My Dreams," the heartbreaking tale of his son's death due to fetal alcohol syndrome; Tim Barrus, the actual author, is white, and the child is a fictional character.
Much like Barrus/Nasdijj, Seltzer imagined a harrowing world that ultimately revolved solely around her and, crucially, projected her own psychodrama onto a geography of radical difference, exchanging white for black, the middle class for the 'hood. In other words, she wrote herself "authentically" in an unintentional parody of liberal sympathy for the suffering subjects of the ghetto.
It is easy to lambaste these writers for their egregious crimes of appropriation, but the ethical responsibility goes beyond them to the publishing industry, and ultimately to the readers who hunger for precisely these kinds of stories. In telling language, Sarah McGrath, Seltzer's editor at Riverhead, told the New York Times of "[feeling] such sympathy for [Seltzer] and she would talk about how she didn't have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light."
