Excerpts:

Scene-by-scene commentary: [Media Assassin]

Full video:

Mr. Khan continued to follow their careers in the pages of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and his reading selections — along with the awareness of his formerly pampered lifestyle — made him a target of other prisoners and also guards.

“I was given the worst things to do, like scrubbing the toilets,” he said, “even though I was capable of helping G.E.D. students.”

Khan was deported to Trinidad at the end of his stint, with $10 to his name. An old friend eventually ran into him and ended up giving him $20,000 to get to Dubai. Now he "has been accepted into the society of wealthy expatriates and Saudi royalty" and is even designing his own jewelry line.

Dubai, Khan told the Times, is "a new Australia." Paging Margaret Seltzer...

[Times]

Inside the book, in small type, they placed a small, incomplete disclaimer that contradicted the labeling on the dust jacket. Free Press and William Morrow are shamelessly stripping the label "non-fiction" of all meaning, at least when they're the ones affixing it. That sort of institutionalized lying is far more pernicious than the freelance deception Frey and Seltzer engaged in.

The Boston Globe dug deep into Mezrich's book, about blackjack-playing MIT students, on Sunday.

Mezrich openly admitted that five of the six main characters from House are not real at all but amalgams of two decades worth of blackjack teams. And who knows whether to trust him even on that, given that he appears to have outright invented other book elements.

The one character in Mezrich's book who is not a composite, the team leader, is portrayed teaching at MIT, which he never did.

The blackjack players in Bringing Down The House smuggle large amounts of cash through airport security using "fake umbrellas and laptop computers, plaster casts and hollow crutches" and eventually by strapping it to their bodies, according to the Globe. But the blackjack team leader said he has never even heard of those techniques, much less used them.

A blue-eyed security guy following the blackjack team supposedly beats one player up in a casino bathroom, but none of the MIT blackjack players contacted by the Globe remembered such a thing happening, or such a security guy.

The best part of the Globe story is easily the weasely quotes from the author and his editors. Here's Mezrich:

"I took literary license to make it readable... The idea that the story is true is more important than being able to prove that it's true."

That sounds familiar.

The editorial director of Bringing Down The House's publisher, Free Press, said fabrication was neccesary to protect some players' anonymity. "There was an obvious need for privacy of some of the people involved," he told the Globe.

The editorial director seemed caught off guard that his author had stretched the truth for narrative purposes — he said that sort of thing is not OK. But he must have known he was marketing as "real-life" biography a work of fabrications, since his company included the disclaimer above.

Mezrich's new publisher, William Morrow, is even more brazen. The company is marketing supposed nonfiction from Mezrich that includes, buried at the end of the author's note, a disclaimer "that warns readers about changed names, compressed time periods, and altered identities and backgrounds. Certain characters, it goes on, 'are not meant to portray particular people.'"

Mauro DiPreta, the book's editor at William Morrow, says the disclaimer was inserted simply "to let the reader know what to expect in the book." What Mezrich does, he argues, is clearly nonfiction. "Sometimes reality is messy," he says. "I think it can be fine to streamline a story for narrative purposes."

Not everyone is happy that the idea of true nonfiction is being destroyed before our very eyes. Narrative non-fiction pioneer Gay Talese and WW Norton editor Robert Weil are quoted rebuking the practice.

But everyone actually involved with producing and potentially profiting from Mezrich's projects seems quite comfortable labeling fiction as nonfiction. They get to potentially profit from deals for movies like 21, and all they have to do is define truth the way one of Mezrich's characters does at the end of the Globe story:

"It's 90 percent true if you count things that happened to anyone," he says. "It's only about half true if you define it as actual things happening to the actual people they happened to."

[Globe]

By the end of the eighteenth century, not just novel readers but most novel writers were women, too. And most historians, along with their readers, were men. As the discipline of history, the anti-novel, emerged, and especially as it professionalized, it defined itself as the domain of men.

...Maybe the topics that have seized professional historians’ attention—family history, social history, women’s history, cultural history, "microhistory"—constitute nothing more than an attempt to take back territory they forfeited to novelists in the eighteenth century. If so, historians have reclaimed from novelists nearly everything except the license to invent . . . and women readers. Today, publishers figure that men buy the great majority of popular history books; most fiction buyers are women.

Is “history at risk”? If women barely read it at all, and if men mostly read books with titles like “Guts and Guns,” it just might be.

The most frustrating thing about the New Yorker essay is that author Jill Lepore, who apparently is a Harvard professor of history, never once stops to examine the function of her profession, despite all her questions.

It is hardly original or controversial (or male, really) to observe that the noblest and most important goal of history is to learn from the mistakes of the past and thus avoid repeating them.

The next time there's a genocide, I hope it is the "historical truth" historians who get to the scene first, because it's going to be a lot harder to refute the inevitable genocide deniers with a historian who dabbles in "fictional truth."

When the U.S. Congress debates the federal budget in the next cycle, I likewise hope the discussion is informed by studies of past deficits and tax schemes conducted by historians with some allegiance to the idea of objective accuracy instead of to insanity like "a reader can find the same truth in a history book and a novel."

And, yes, the next time there's a discussion on how to combat urban poverty and inner-city crime, I'm glad no one will be holding up Margaret Seltzer's "memoir" as an example of anything, despite the heavy-handed political ideology the author bandied about before she was caught.

If many women aren't buying history in the strict sense, the solution is not to change the definition of history or standards of historic study, it's to convince more girls and women there's a point in preparing for a time when they have a good deal of power and need to use it wisely.

I will now conclude this stern and dry and probably boring rant and return to my attempts to entertain with blog posts based on information of often uncertain accuracy, since I am not a professor of history at Harvard University.

New Yorker: A Critic at Large / Just the Facts, Ma’Am / Fake memoirs, factual fictions, and the history of history

The weekend before last, [Seltzer's agent] Faye [Bender] called me. She said, "Inga, I need you to sit down." This is when I found out that Peggy's entire life for the past decade is a lie. This elaborately constructed life/lie was in place long, long before Peggy ever gave me her writing. As far as I know, her daughter and baby-daddy also believe this life/lie.

Faye asked me if I would speak to a New York Times reporter. I agreed. Big mistake. Now my name was associated with a highly seasoned pathological liar. Worse, two anecdotes from Peggy's life/lie made it into Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil.

Davies had been accused of deceptive writing in 2004 by the Financial Times, Women's Wear Daily reported. In 2005, she was fired from her own paper, the Times of London, over shady expense reports. Also? She had a tattoo on her forehead that said "Liar, no book deals." (In case McGrath happens to be reading this, I should note that last sentence was a fabrication.)

The scandal broke in mid-March 2006. Scribner nixed the book deal by March 30. On April 18, one month and one day after Women's Wear Daily published its investigation, complete with comparisons to James Frey's fake memoir, Publisher's Weekly reported McGrath was parting with Scribner and accepting a new job at Riverhead — Seltzer contract in tow, it turned out.

"McGrath is credited with editing an array of high profile writers including Maile Meloy, Eric Puchner and Chip Kidd," the trade wrote.

Judging from a 2000 rejection letter, first published by Literary Rejections On Display, McGrath assembled her stable of "high-profile" writers by keeping her expectations high; in the letter she said she was hunting for manuscripts that "blow me away." McGrath hardly softened the rejection when she mentioned, right there in the first paragraph, another, implicitly better writer of hers, Erika Krouse, who "I am publishing this spring," unlike the rejection recipient.

If nothing else, the document is a reminder of the competitive pressures that help drive some authors to start plagiarizing and making things up:

[Publisher's Weekly, First Post, Literary Rejections On Display]

To the newsroom staff:

Single-source profiles of people who are not already well known quantities are traps we have fallen into twice in the past year or two, and that's too often. Until publishers start fact-checking their own nonfiction books, and that'll be the day, we should remember that profiles of unknown authors should always include reporting from other sources — not just surrogates of the profilee like agents, publishers, lawyers, etc. — to verifiy the most important facts. But even when there's no book involved, the same rule applies. If we can't find ways to check key facts, names, graduation claims, etc., we should hold the story until we can verify them, and if we can't, we should be suspicious. Live and learn....

Craig

[Tabloid Baby]

Though ostensibly a South Central Blood, "Chatman" often sounds like he's writing a vulgar, awkwardly-phrased college term paper on power relations within the drug trade.

"Just the same as countries like Colombia and Afghanistan stake the greater benefits of their economy in the drug trade," Chatman wrote, "all these foreign drugs find their way to the streets of Los Angeles, where the impoverished and the gangs stake their economical benefits in the same trade."

"The gangs, the impoverished, the distributors, processors, traffickers, merchants, and consumers work in the streets day to day. Militias protect the interest of poppy fields of Afghanistan and Coca plantations of Colombia just the same as gang members protect their common interest and profits with AK 47’s, small armies and control of enough area to assure that all profitable substances will be sold on time."

Chatman also said he joined the Bloods at age eight, dropped out of high school, learned to make crack from his father and, uh, identifies as part of Generation X.

Also? He's a big fan of Margaret Seltzer! Referring to Seltzer by her pen name Margaret Jones, Chatman wrote:

Margaret Jones is one of those who was fit to survive the 3rd world conditions of Los Angeles. Every moment of trauma and oppression within her life she overcame with successful accomplishments and great.

...Margaret Jones is a product of the hood. She has seen her share of desensitizing events and hardships, enough to be a soldier in the fight against poverty, oppression and ignorance. She continued to fight her way through the University of Oregon where she graduated with a Bachelor’s of Science degree in Ethnic Studies, but she began her fight in South Central LA, below the Hollywood sign.

Since the site is destined to be taken down sooner or later, screenshots of the Chatman biography and "Foundation Information" page follow.

NPR bit:

From WBUR, Seltzer is a little too defensive about how many kids she shared her South Central LA foster home with:

Also from WBUR, Seltzer protects her ruse as she so often does, by shifting the conversation from the specifics of her life to broader social issues. (Incidentally, this story was clearly recycled for the NPR clip above, nearly verbatim, but that tactic is hardly uncommon among authors on book tours.)

Ms. McGrath, who never met Ms. Seltzer during three years spent editing the book, said Ms. Seltzer, who lives in Eugene, Ore., had provided what she said were photographs of her foster siblings, a letter from a gang leader corroborating her story and had introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a person who claimed to be a foster sister.

Ms. McGrath said she also trusted Ms. Seltzer because she had come through “a respected literary agent” who had in turn been referred to the author by a writer whom Ms. Bender had worked with previously.

Just to be clear, the evidence collected by Seltzer's publishing house, unless they forgot to tell the Times about something, consisted of an unauthenticated photograph, easily faked; an unauthenticated letter, also easily faked; and a secondhand introduction with an alleged primary actor in the memoir — much easier to fake than, say, a direct and lengthy interview with said source.

But why worry? Seltzer's agent Faye Bender, who McGrath said she totally trusted, said "there was no reason to doubt [Seltzer,] ever." Um, what?

Funnier still were the standards at the Times House & Home section, which profiled Seltzer separate from Michiko Kakutani's book review. The section's legwork consisted of trying to find Seltzer family members to interview and, when that proved surprisingly difficult (go figure), tracking down a prison name and prison identification number for Uncle Madd Ronald, Seltzer's supposed gang leader. Did the Times ever reach anyone claiming to be Ronald? No. But they did get this seemingly bulletproof confirmation:

Ms. Seltzer provided a prison name and prison identification number, and a copy editor confirmed that the prison existed.

Of course the writer of the Times story, Mimi Read, thought everything would be fine because, like so many of the Manhattan media types involved in this sad affair, she figured she had a good innate sense of what a ghetto-raised ex-gangbanger would sound like:

“The way I look at it is that it’s just like when you get in a car and drive to the store — you assume that the other drivers on the road aren’t psychopaths on a suicide mission,” said Ms. Read, who was never told Ms. Seltzer’s real name by the publisher or by Ms. Seltzer. “She seemed to be who she said she was. Nothing in her home or conversation or happenstance led me to believe otherwise.”

One of Seltzer's cheaper tricks is a frequent use of urban black slang, which she probably inserted into her speech to bolster her claim of having grown up in South Central LA instead of, like, the San Fernando Valley:

Q: How did this book originate?

A: During my senior year of college one of my professors told me a friend of hers was working on a book and wanted to interview me. I declined. I wasn’t interested in the whole “South-Central-as-petting-zoo” thing. Then my home girl said the teacher might mess around and fail me for rejecting her friend, so I ended up calling the author and doing the interview. She was real nice and asked me if I had ever written anything. I ended up giving her one of a number of short stories I had written for my brothers’ kids and for the kids of my homies serving life sentences.

...

Q: What makes the difference between someone who is able to move up and on and out of the inner city and someone else who follows the trajectory into crime, juvenile detention, prison, and so on?

A: I wish I knew. I’ve got my homeboy who’s doing life who wrote me, “You and OG homie are the only ones who made it out.” Well, OG homie is now locked up. And I can’t even judge.

Requisite irony:

Q: What was it like for you going back and digging up all those painful memories of your childhood and teen years?

A: It was heart wrenching. And the amazing thing is that no matter how many rounds of edits I sat down with, it was heart wrenching each time. Sarah McGrath, my editor at Riverhead Books, said, “Every time I hit a certain page I cry.” I told her, “If you only knew! I hit that same page and cry every time too.”

The more blatant fabrications are also fun:

Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?

A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.

...

Q: You were 16 when you cooked your first batch of rock cocaine. What led you to do that?

A: Our water had been shut off because Big Mom couldn’t pay the bill. If your water is cut off social services is going to come and say it’s bad living conditions and take the kids out of there. Where I was was cool. I was with people who loved me. I didn’t want us to be split up so I was trying to be part of the solution. That meant bringing in money and getting the water turned back on. Once again that’s not a choice kids should have to make. I knew it was not right—cooking up rock. I knew I was contributing negatively to the community. But the water got put back on the same day. The reward was there. To go from wearing third generation hand-me-downs to wearing name brand everything—when you’re a kid that stuff matt

Then there are the odd things Seltzer just can't remember. Like the sexual abuse she said she suffered as a child, which in the Q&A she implied was something she "barely remembered." Or the question below, where her repeated shrugs get more than a little suspicious:

Q: Do you think it was a good thing you were removed from your parents’ home and put into the foster care system?

A: Who knows? Who can say? What would have happened if I hadn’t been put into the system? To answer that you have to enter the realm of speculation and I try not to get caught up in “would have,” “should have,” and “could have.” What I can say is that I’m a strong person and that I’m very proud of the person I am today. I don’t have a lot of room for regrets, especially over choices I didn’t have.

Seltzer was also tired of her 'hood being stereotyped:

Q: What’s the biggest misconception people have about South Central, about gangs, about the ghetto?

A: Where to start? You meet someone and they ask where you’re from. If you say South Central they immediately ask if you were in a gang. Of course not everyone was, but then you’re embarrassed when you have to say, “Yeah I was.” And then they ask if you ever killed anybody. What? Who would ask that of anybody? There’s this whole misconception that we’re all cold-hearted killers, drinking forties out of paper bags, driving around in low riders—Bloods looking for CRIPs; CRIPs looking for Bloods—trying to shoot each other all night long. At one point I was showing my agent around my old neighborhood. We were shooting a video for the book. She said it was so much nicer than she thought it was going to be and that people were so friendly. We went to a local park and this couple walked up to us. I could see the camera crew suddenly got nervous. In my head I’m thinking, what do you think is going to happen? But then the couple was nice and all I could do was smile.

Sometimes you wonder why anyone believed Seltzer, particularly while listening to her weaker, more simpleminded lies and tricks:

Q: Throughout the book, when presenting dialogue, you write in slang. You also replace the c’s in many words with k’s. Why?

A: You have to find a balance. You want to make the book understandable to the average reader in the suburbs but you also want it to be realistic. I’m not going to walk into a store and say, “Hi. How are you doing? Nice to meet you!” I felt if I did that in the book something would be lost. And I want people to understand how deep-seated the hatred really is between CRIPs and Bloods. CRIPs celebrate C-days rather than B-days (birthdays) and Bloods smoke bigarettes not cigarettes. The hate is so deep that, as a Blood, you automatically change the spelling in words with a c in them.

Then there are the downright weird lies, where it seems like Seltzer is making it up as she goes along and lets herself go off on a tangent. Like in her story about the cop who buys pit bulls from gangster dog breeders:

Q: My understanding is that you’re an “inactive” gang member—that you’ve been given permission by the gang to step down from activity but are still considered friendly, and thus protected. Is that the case?

A: Am I “inactive?” I don’t know. There’s really no such thing. I breed pit bulls and just took some down to Los Angeles for this guy. He said, “I saw your photo on My Space. You’re a Blood, right?” I told him I was a Blood once upon a time. He said he’d never heard of such a thing as an ex-gang member. I asked where he was from and he told me he was a police officer.

As others have noticed, the Times itself noted the connection between Seltzer and Sarah McGrath in its expose on Seltzer, and also disclosed Charles McGrath's current Times job title of "Writer At Large." The paper also said that Sarah McGrath moved Seltzer's contract with her when McGrath jumped from a division of Simon & Schuster to a division of Penguin Group.

The Times did not note Charles McGrath's tenure at the Book Review, where he would have had plenty of time to get to know Kakutani — if the Book Review had much contact with Kakutani at the daily paper, which it did not, at least under his successor.

A Book Review editor, Barry Gewen, said last year he had never met Kakutani in 18 years at the paper. So perhaps McGrath and Kakutani were strangers.

Also, Kakutani's glowing treatment of "Love and Consequences" is not, on its own, evidence of special treatment. She has been described as taking extreme, love-it-or-hate it positions on the books she reviews. And she was likely also dazzled by how well the book stacked up against other autobiographies. Seltzer had the spectacular advantage over her nonfiction competitors of not being limited to faded memories of actual events, and this apparently allowed her to deliver the same sorts of fake thrills that propelled James Frey's fabricated memoir, A Million Little Pieces, on to Oprah Winfrey's TV show and the bestseller lists.

Still, the tight cluster of relationships between Seltzer, her loyal agent Sarah McGrath, Sarah's father Charles and the Times raises the question of whether Setlzer's book received more attention and less skepticism than was warranted. The paper should investigate its own coverage with the same scrutiny now brought to bear on "Love and Consequences."

Seltzer's adulatory press was her unraveling. After a profile last week in the House & Home section of the Times, Jones' older sister called her publisher to rat her out.

Seltzer told the Times the whole thing started after she spent time with some people from the wrong side of the tracks:

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

... Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks at the corner of Crenshaw and Stockyard. People would come in and say, ‘What are you doing?’ because I would be sitting there all day every day. I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not gang members.”

From before she was caught, here are Seltzer's rules of the street, which she said were conveyed to her by a compatriot in the drug trade. Her publisher would have been wise to follow them, particularly given the moral landscape in the memoir trade these days, which at this point would startle even the most hardened blood or crip:

¶ “Trust no one. Even your own momma will sell you out for the right price or if she gets scared enough.”

¶ “War has no room for diplomacy, war is outright vicious. Never expect mercy and never show it.”

¶ “There is no greater sin in war than ignorance. Never speak or act on anything you aren’t 100 percent sure of, or someone will expose your mistake and take you down for it.”

The saddest thing for Seltzer in all this is that she couldn't drag her deception out just a little bit longer. Her adulatory Times clips had her on track for bestseller status in the mold of A Million Little Pieces, by fellow lying memoirist James Frey. If she had been caught a few months down the road, she would still have been disgraced, but at least would also have had a shot at profiting off her infamy by selling a clearly labeled work of fiction for upwards of $1 million, as Frey did.

Times: Author Admits Acclaimed Memoir Is Fantasy

Related: Review - However Mean the Streets, Have an Exit Strategy (Times)

Related: Profile - A Refugee From Gangland (Times)

(Thanks to Josh for the tip.)