Woman admits fabricating memoir

Mar 03 2008

It wasn’t all that long ago when James Frey confessed that much of his memoir had been fabricated, only after Oprah had selected it for her book club and boosted its popularity – before the book came crashing back down to earth. So it seems incomprehensible that anyone would fabricate a memoir with the James Frey debacle still somewhat fresh in our collective literary memory.

Yet it has happened again. According to a very recent article I stumbled across in the New York Times, a woman has confessed to fabricating her 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.

That sounds like a very interesting read, until you find out that Margaret Jones is really Margaret Seltzer, who has lived a life of anything but violence and hardship:

…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.

Not even close. The publisher of the faux-memoir was quick to respond:

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published "Love and Consequences," is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

I should also mention that this comes very close to another memoir-outing (even more recent than James Frey), when it was revealed that Misha Devonseca’s memoir about the holocaust also turned out to be a fake.

The bigger question that’s on my mind right now is "Why?" These people are obviously talented writers and could probably write a good piece of fiction (oh wait, they did). But seriously, why not just write a novel and market it as fiction. Did they really think they’d be able to get away with it?

Margaret Seltzer does offer a glimpse into her train of thought by saying it could have been ego as part of the reason she fabricated an entire memoir. I think that goes without saying, though.

The other question on my mind is what responsibility does the publisher have in all this? Is a publishing house supposed to take on the job of a fact-checker and make sure all these memoirs add up? That might be going a little too far. In the end I think that writers still have to take responsibility for their work and show a little integrity. Maybe publishers should start requiring that the authors of memoirs sign a statement that the memoir is factually accurate, and if it turns out to be otherwise, the author can be sued for breach of contract.

I don’t know if that’s the right answer either. I don’t want the world of publishing to get so restrictive that people become afraid to publish their book for fear of being sued. In the end, I think people should just be honest!

What do you think? Does the publisher share responsibility for what books they publish and their content? How can this be prevented in the future (or is that even possible)? Leave a comment and let us know what you think!

Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction

4 Responses

It’s simple. Memoirs are easier to sell than fiction is. Once that changes, the fake memoirs will stop appearing.

Susan Helene Gottfried 3/4/2008 12:03 pm
exactly! Non-fiction sells right now in a way that fiction does not. And that encourages people to BS rather than just tell a story and call it one. It’s like our society’s love for “reality” has led to a more devious layer of falsehood — not unsimilar to what happened when “reality shows” replaced sit-coms.

Amy 3/4/2008 1:42 pm
I definitely think that the publisher’s share in the responsibility for this. While I don’t expect them to do fact checking, I think that assigning a work as a memoir should at least involve some kind of contract between them and the author. Then, when this kind of debacle occurs, they can say that the author is in violation of the contract.
Also, I cannot comprehend why these authors don’t classify their work as fiction, or in Frey’s case, partially fictionalized. I think fiction is far more challenging than memoir anyway, which is another topic for discussion altogether.

Melissa Donovan 3/4/2008 3:32 pm
So sad that the Rosenblats lied about their story. Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was a great book and now movie, never pretended to be true. The Rosenblats, like Madoff, harming other Jews and it’s terrible.
I read a New York Times article about Stan Lee and Neal Adams the comic book artists supporting another TRUE Holocaust love story. There was a beautiful young artist, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt, who painted Snow White and the Seven Dwarves on the children’s barracks at Auschwitz to cheer them up. Dina’s art became the reason she and her Mother survived Auschwitz.
Painting the mural for the children caused Dina to be taken in front of Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death. She thought she was going to be gassed, but bravely she stood up to Mengele and he decided to make her his portrait painter, saving herself and her mother from the gas chamber as long as she was doing painting for him.
Dina’s story is true because some of the paintings she did for Mengele in Auschwitz survived the war and are at the Auschwitz Birkenau Museum. Also, the story of her painting the mural of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on the children’s barrack has been corroborated by many other Auschwitz prisoners, and of course her love and marriage to the animator of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs the Disney movie after the war in Paris is also a fact.
I wish Oprah would do a story about Dina and her art not about the Rosenblats who were pulling the wool over all our eyes.

Maria 1/5/2009 10:03 am