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margaret seltzer
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Let's Ruin History, The Margaret Seltzer Way
The New Yorker just published a ridiculous, hand-wavy essay questioning the importance of factual truth in history and providing some sliver of refuge to fake memoirists like Margaret Seltzer even as it badmouths them. The essay is littered with questions, and they all have the sort of "everything is relative, man" ring you'd expect from discussions in an undergraduate philosophy class. "What makes a book a history?" "Is historical truth truer than fictional truth?" "If a history book can be read as if it were a novel and if a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel... what's the difference between them?" "Is history at risk?" There are a total of 16 question marks in the piece beginning to end, but they all drive transparently at the same answer, delivered toward the close of the essay in this summary of the historic meditations of English writer William Godwin: "The novelist is the better historian—and especially better than the empirical historian—because he admits that he is partial, prejudiced, and ignorant, and because he has not forsaken passion." The piece concludes by exploring, in a crescendo of absurdity, the idea that history — real, true, actual history as the term is understood today — should perhaps embrace a "license to invent" to draw in women readers, since women read novels and avoid contemporary history: More »
At Least Lying Author Was Convincing
"To discredit Love and Consequences... allows Americans the luxury of continuing to ignore the problems the book represents, or at best of waiting for another voice to bring it to our attention. Every memoir or autobiography is an individual’s fashioning of his or her life, directed toward that individual’s conception of audience. The more intimate or psychological the events recounted — of childhood trauma, of addiction, of religious conversion, or even of racial identity — the more ludicrous it is for readers to insist upon documentary truth." [Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard via MediaBistro]
"To discredit Love and Consequences... allows Americans the luxury of continuing to ignore the problems the book represents, or at best of waiting for another voice to bring it to our attention. Every memoir or autobiography is an individual’s fashioning of his or her life, directed toward that individual’s conception of audience. The more intimate or psychological the events recounted — of childhood trauma, of addiction, of religious conversion, or even of racial identity — the more ludicrous it is for readers to insist upon documentary truth." [Eugene, Oregon Register-Guard via MediaBistro]
margaret seltzer
Second Disaster Book For Editor Of Fabricator
Riverhead Books editor Sarah McGrath, who shepherded the fake memoir from Margaret Seltzer (left), bought a spectacularly inaccurate memoir once before. In 2006, Scribner canceled McGrath's reported $900,000 deal to buy a memoir from fashion reporter Emily Davies. Women's Wear Daily had publicly fact-checked Davies' 79-page proposal and raised many questions, including about an alleged dinner with Donna Karan, a supposed party with Jennifer Lopez and a dubious meeting involving three industry players. It also found a quote had been lifted from a 1998 Times article. And those weren't the only strikes against Davies — she had been in two prior scandals. More »
margaret seltzer
Fake Memoirist Already Exploited By James Frey
Lying writer James Frey will be damned if he is going to miss an opportunity to milk literary deception for all it's worth, so he's already launched a new publicity campaign, less than 48 hours after newb lying writer Margaret Seltzer got the whole country talking about fake autobiographers again. Of course it's probably just a total coincidence that Frey chose now to launch the new blog where most of the text is copied from other sites, where Frey posts a purported lesbian fantasy video (so not worth it) and where he of course promotes his million-dollar-plus novel the name of which is not important. After the jump, the email Frey just sent out to his adoring fans. Watch and learn BG Seltzer: More »
Lying Author's Real Trafficking Changes Everything
"Her senior farewell in the 1992 Campbell Hall yearbook reads, 'To my family I love you all so much, thank you for everything.' Meanwhile, her high school friends call her 'Pegatha,' their 'Skittle supplier' whose hardest drug consumed was 'vanilla coffee for finals.'" [P6]
"Her senior farewell in the 1992 Campbell Hall yearbook reads, 'To my family I love you all so much, thank you for everything.' Meanwhile, her high school friends call her 'Pegatha,' their 'Skittle supplier' whose hardest drug consumed was 'vanilla coffee for finals.'" [P6]
margaret seltzer
Lying Author Puts "OG Madd Ronald" On Her "Foundation" Website
Before she was exposed as a well-off suburban girl rather than a hardscrabble gangster, lying memoirist Margaret Seltzer claimed to have set up a "foundation" called International Brother/SisterHood, either to support her backstory, preemptively redeem herself or maybe just somehow swindle more money. (Thanks to commenter Sigerson for spotting the site and Hamud for taking an early crack at it.) The foundation's website appears to have been registered in the name of Seltzer's agent, Faye Bender, and claims the foundation does pretty much whatever you need, from gangland peace negotiations to anti-gang education to mentoring. "Although we were Bloods, we hold no grudges against CRIPS," the site reads. The most outlandish part is easily the biography of Seltzer's alleged "OG" mentor in the Bloods street gang, Madd Ronald, who the site said also goes by the name "Ronald Chatman." More »
Fact-Checked Memoirs Would Cost $100 Each
"Whenever a case like this comes to light, someone asks: Why don't publishers fact-check their books? The basic answer is that it's not practical. Publishers release hundreds of books each year, most of them several hundred pages long. A publisher simply can't afford to fact-check all of those books to the standards of, say, the New Yorker, where a fact checker essentially re-reports each story." [NY Sun]
"Whenever a case like this comes to light, someone asks: Why don't publishers fact-check their books? The basic answer is that it's not practical. Publishers release hundreds of books each year, most of them several hundred pages long. A publisher simply can't afford to fact-check all of those books to the standards of, say, the New Yorker, where a fact checker essentially re-reports each story." [NY Sun]
margaret seltzer
NPR Waiting For Fake Memoirist To Return Message
NPR radio show Tell Me More was all set to air its interview with the author of the memoir Love and Consequences today, but then producers picked up this morning's Times and realized that might not be such a great idea. So they put in a phone call or email or something to the author, Margaret Seltzer, and are eagerly waiting to hear back. In the (likely eternal) meantime, they posted a very brief excerpt of their interview with Seltzer (pen name Margaret Jones), featured after the jump. Also after the jump: Some choice moments from Seltzer's interview with another radio show, WBUR's On Point, in which Seltzer sounds like she's scrambling to keep her lies hidden. More »
margaret seltzer
Editors' Pathetic Attempts To Fact Check Lying Author
The Times just posted a fascinating follow-up article on the saga of fake memoirist Magaret Seltzer, the well-off white lady who pretended to be a half-Native American gangbanger raised by a foster parent in the ghetto. In it, we learn that none of the editors or publishers involved in the publication of Seltzer's book or subsequent articles about it feels particularly badly about not detecting Seltzer's lies, because the author lied like a crazy person, enlisted a couple of fake foster siblings and it's not like anyone saw this coming. “The one thing we wish,” Riverhead Books publisher Geoffrey Kloske told the Times, “is that the author had told us the truth." Kloske's people, along with the Times itself, were suspicious enough that they did some fact checking, but couldn't manage more than the sad and weak sort of fact checking sadly lacking in primary sources. Here, for example, is how Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath plumbed the depths of Seltzer's background, or, uh, didn't: More »
margaret seltzer
Fabricating Writer's Hilarious Interview
Before her publisher Penguin Group realized she was a liar and recalled her memoir, Margaret Seltzer gave an interview on Penguin's website and, probably, in press kits distributed to book reviewers. The interview is chock-full of quotes from Seltzer about her life as an impoverished gang banger raised in a Los Angeles ghetto by a foster parent called "Big Mom." The statements of course look absurd and hilarious, since everyone now knows Seltzer was raised by her biological parents in a nice suburb, where she attended private school and was not a member of a gang at all. Go read Seltzer's lies, issued under her pen name "Margaret Jones," while they are still up on Penguin's website, or just take in highlights, after the jump. More »
margaret seltzer
Lying Author's Ties To The Times Book Review
Before being exposed as a fabrication, Margaret Seltzer's memoir "Love and Consequences" received quite a bit of flattering notice in the Times. Michiko Kakutani wrote a glowing review praising, among other things, Seltzer's "amazing job" at recreating the South Central neighborhood where it turned out she had never lived. Seltzer was also the subject, improbably, of a friendly "Home & Garden" section profile, which consisted mainly of Seltzer telling fabricated stories about her life and lounging around "a four-bedroom 1940s bungalow" whose interior is described in the profile in random asides — a "soft black vinyl chair" here, a "small art table" there. All the more interesting, then, that Seltzer's book was shepherded into print over the course of three years by Penguin Group editor Sarah McGrath, whose father is an active writer for the Times and was, for eight years starting in 1995, the editor of the New York Times Book Review. More »
margaret seltzer
