Tuesday, March 04, 2008

there would be your consequences

If I thought this story rang a little false, you'd think her publisher would have at least looked into Margaret Seltzer's completely fabricated memoir.

In “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South- Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Then again, publishers don't really seem quite with it these days.

And hey, it's not like Seltzer claimed to have run with a pack of wolves during the Holocaust.
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