The consequences of the 'Love and Consequences' hoax
Mar 4, 2008, 07:01 PM | by Annie Barrett
Categories: Books, Celebrity Scandals, James Frey
Love and Consequences (pictured, right), Margaret B. Jones' memoir about growing up and running drugs in South Central L.A., hit bookshelves on Friday. But all copies have been recalled, because the author — whose real last name is Seltzer — made the story up. She's not half-Native American. She never lived in foster care under the tutelage of a figure called "Big Mom, which means she never had a foster brother named Terrell who got shot by the Crips. Seltzer's publisher (Riverhead, an imprint of Penguin), editor, and agent hadn't a clue about any of this until Seltzer's sister (her sister!) read this over-the-top Times profile and outed her as a fraud. Margaret Seltzer actually grew up in Sherman Oaks (which O.C. fans may know as The Real Valley. Sorry). In EW's book review (published Feb. 22), Vanessa Juarez presciently wondered "if Jones embellishes the dialogue." Indeed!
The news is mind-boggling in a "How did she get away with this?!" sort of way (It's only now, after the reviews and after a Times profile, that the sister comes forward? No other alarm bells went off for anyone else during the years it took to bring the manuscript to market?), but the fabrication itself simply isn't that surprising anymore. Just last week, Misha Defonseca's Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years (left), was exposed as a hoax after 11 years in print. Then there's the James Frey saga, the JT Leroy hoax, blah blah blah, etc. It's getting just as easy to believe that some gambler made the whole thing up as it is that an autobiographical account could be entirely honest.
With Seltzer, we can blame the specific parties involved — the fabulist author, her agent, and her editor, Sarah McGrath, who, based on her quotes in this article, seems to have never met Seltzer in person. But beyond that, there seems to be a crisis of "How interesting is the subject?" at play — not only in publishing, but in all of pop culture. We're more interested in celebrities when what they do is horrifying. We want our reality TV subjects to be as f---ed up as possible, and when the jokers on TV tweak their personas accordingly, we think, "Nice move, now you'll get more screen time." We know that after some point — maybe even from the beginning — these people are not really being themselves. They're playing extreme characters that producers know will sell stories. Real face, ridiculous background. It seems the same disparity would be at play with a juicy memoir.
In an attempt to explain herself, Seltzer laments, "Maybe it's an ego thing — I don't know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it." A knee-jerk reaction to that comment — and a question constantly brought up during the Frey scandal — is "Why not just publish the story as fiction?" Clearly, publishers don't think anyone would buy it. Would you? Is a writer with a somewhat tragic background that much more marketable? And is a memoir only noteworthy if it's true?
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