Read my latest flash, Venison, at 52|250.

After just one week on the market, a critically acclaimed memoir about growing up as a half-white, half-Native American foster child in South-Central Los Angeles and running drugs for the Bloods has been revealed to be fraudulent. Love and Consequences was, in fact, written by an all-white woman who grew up with her birth family in an affluent neighborhood. This woman, Margaret Seltzer, has said that these stories are true but came from people she met while she worked to mitigate gang violence in LA.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. 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.”

Of course, she could have written a narrative of her actual experience and woven the stories of her friends and acquaintances into it. Or, if she didn’t want her real story to be the center of it, she could have written a novel. She had, in fact, been writing of her friends’ experiences in creative writing courses before she decided to call them her own. Instead, she chose the lazy way: to claim another’s story as her own and play on people’s sympathies to gain publication, reputation, and cash.

But if I were only to criticize her, I would be doing no more than shooting fish in a barrel. Also to blame here is the general memoirization of the American publishing industry and of American literature. The tendency to encourage a writer because of the poignancy of their life experiences rather than the quality of their writing encourages the false memoir phenomenon. It also limits the range of what may be written about.

I have a difficult time believing the claim of a writer who helped her that Ms. Seltzer is “very, very naïve”. She made a smart business decision for herself (up until the time she allowed publicity to get to the point where her lies was revealed) in such a climate. She tried to game the system and lost.

EDIT: Alternet has published a smart analysis by James Dolan of recent false memoir scandals. He argues that the essential aspects of each fraud is an element of “exotic, glamorous pain”, a tendency to uphold “sacred narratives”, and “an opportunity for extended, voluptuous descriptions of sin, glorious sin!”

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.