Hell, that's two *this week*....
http://www.cnn.com/2008/SHOWBIZ/books/02/29/holocaust.bookhoax.ap/index.html
On 3/4/08, Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
>
> Doesn't this make one a year of these for the past three or four
> years? There's probably more than you want to know about Laura
> Albert/J.T. Leroy here from just last week:
>
>
> http://www.laweekly.com/art+books/books/the-lies-and-follies-of-laura-albert-aka-jt-leroy/18362/?page=1
>
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/california/la-me-author4mar04,1,6138937.story
>
>
>
> BOOK NEWS
>
> Author admits gang-life 'memoir' was all fiction
>
> Sister blew whistle on Margaret B. Jones, who said she was a foster
> child in South L.A., but really grew up with family in Sherman Oaks.
> By Bob Pool and Rebecca Trounson
>
> Los Angeles Times Staff Writers
>
> March 4, 2008
>
> The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves.
> It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction.
>
> The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed
> autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los
> Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her
> just-published book.
>
> "Jones" is actually 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 Riverhead announced Monday that it had withdrawn "Love and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.
>
> "I think she got caught up in the facts of the story she was trying
> to write," Gay Seltzer said. "She's always been an activist and she
> tried to draw on the immediacy of the situation and became caught up
> in the persona of the narrator. She's very sorry and very upset."
>
> Gay Seltzer, of Sherman Oaks, said she had been aware of her
> daughter's book, but had not read it or known that it was a
> purportedly personal account of gang life.
>
> She confirmed that Hoffman had revealed the hoax.
>
> Margaret Seltzer's literary agent, Faye Bender, declined to comment.
>
> "I'm so sorry, I can't be a part of it. I'm running out" the door, she
> said.
>
> But 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.
>
> McGrath, whom the paper identified as the daughter of former New York
> Times book review editor and current writer-at-large Charles McGrath,
> characterized the deception as "a huge personal betrayal" and "a
> professional one."
>
> "Love and Consequences" drew admiring reviews from critics. Los
> Angeles Times book reviewer Susan Salter Reynolds cited "her loyalty
> to the language, the sense of community, the tight bonds she formed
> with her gang."
>
> The review told of how "at 5, Margaret B. Jones, part white, part
> Native American, was taken from her suburban Southern California home
> after she came to school bleeding from what the teachers and social
> workers assumed was a sexual assault. She spent three years in foster
> care before landing with 'Big Mom,' a hard-working black woman
> raising four grandchildren in South Central Los Angeles. It didn't
> take Jones long to fall in with the Bloods."
>
> The reviewer told of how the book described "Jones" selling drugs at
> age 12 because she was "eager to earn my own money toward the
> flame-red Nike Cortez with fat laces that everyone else wore, but
> even more excited to prove myself worthy of wearing the affiliated
> color and moving up the ranks."
>
> Seltzer told the New York Times that although the personal story told
> in the book was fabricated, other details were based on friends' real
> experiences.
>
> "I just felt there was good that I could do and there was no other
> way that someone would listen to it," she said.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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