Author Admits Gang Memoir Was a Big Fake

Posted on March 4, 2008

Here we go again. The author of the nonfiction gang memoir book Love and Consequences admits that the book was actually fiction. Margaret B. Jones' sister ratted her out, revealing that Ms. Jones was not a mixed race foster child who grew up with the gangbangers in South L.A., but instead grew up with her white family in suburban Sherman Oaks. Oh, and her name isn't Margaret B. Jones, it's Margaret Seltzer.

Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley.
Her admission that she is a fake came in a tearful mea culpa to the New York Times, which last week published a profile of Seltzer using her pseudonym. It was accompanied by a photograph of the 33-year-old and her 8-year-old daughter in Eugene, Ore., where they now live. Seltzer was unmasked when her sister Cyndi Hoffman, 47, saw the newspaper's profile and notified the memoir's publisher, Riverhead Books, that Seltzer's story was untrue.
Riverhead announced Monday that it had withdrawn "Love and Consequences" and canceled a book tour that was supposed to have started yesterday in Eugene. Seltzer could not be reached at her home for comment late Monday. In a brief telephone interview, Seltzer's mother said her daughter was very upset and contrite about the fabrication, but had been advised by her editor not to speak further about it for the moment.
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...Sarah McGrath, Seltzer's editor at Riverhead, told the New York Times on Monday that the publishing house was stunned by the disclosure. "It's very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn't have any money or heat and we completely bought into that," McGrath told the newspaper.

This is starting to make us wonder: how many of these incredibly well-reviewed, unusual biographies are just fiction? So what's her excuse? Is it because her fiction didn't sell? Because editors don't buy memoirs of white girls from Sherman Oaks? Whatever the reason, we just wish it would stop. It's bad for authors, bad for the publishers and really bad for the book business. Oh, and as for the sister who blew her cover, we're sure her motives were pure and her actions in no way reflected some kind of unbelievable jealousy that her sister got a book contract.