Another fake memoir!! This time it’s by a white woman who claimed she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother and sold drugs for an LA gang. Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones has been recalled by the publisher (Penguin Group USA.) The author is actually Margaret Seltzer who grew up in a well-off area of San Francisco Valley with her biological family. She attended private Episcopal day school and never lived with a foster family or sold drugs for a gang. She managed to fool her editor and the New York Times. Her older sister called the publisher and blew the whistle after she saw the NY Times article.
Fiction as memoir seems to have a market. You remember James Frey and A Million Little Pieces. Last week Misha: a Memoir of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca was discovered to be a fake also. It was published in 1997.
I wonder why these writers do not call it fiction?
Comments (1)
The most unfortunate part of this situation, in my opinion, is that these recent incidents only further undermine the trust between author and reader. As luck would have it, the week my literary agent and I first approached publishers with my addiction memoir, “An Officer and A Junkie: From West Point to the Point of No Return”, James Frey was being exposed as a fraud. All the publishers immediately turned us down; no one wanted to touch another memoir, let alone one on addiction. We realized that we had to do something intrinsically unique and different to confirm the veracity of my story and reestablish faith with the reader. Ultimately, we decided to insert source material in my memoir, including documents such as police records, officer evaluation reports, hospital records, and journal entries. In hindsight, transforming my book into the first “documented memoir” is one of the most important decisions I’ve made for my story. I hope that I am setting something of a precedent, because right now the state of memoirs is in rather poor condition and something needs to be done in the future to ensure some level of authenticity. For more information, please visit my website at: www.michaelwinder.com.
Posted by michael | March 7, 2008 2:13 PM
Posted on March 7, 2008 14:13