The latest literary scandal is a banal and predictable one: a new memoir (Love and Consequences, by Margaret B. Jones) that claims to be the account of a "half-white, half-Native American" young woman who ran with the Bloods in South Central LA, turns out to have been written by a privileged young white woman named Margaret Seltzer from Sherman Oaks, who went to a private school and probably ran with the Heathers, if she ran with anybody. You can read all about it in the New York Times. It comes on the heels of (another) fake Holocaust memoir (not to mention in the wake of James Frey and J. T. Leroy), and it will no doubt provoke the usual handwringing: How could this happen? Don't agents and editors check the veracity of the memoirs they publish? Don't publishers have fact-checkers? (Answers: Easily. Not really. Generally speaking, no.)
The only one of the usual handwringing questions that interests me is why any young memoirist in this day and age thinks he or she can get away with a fraud like this. The author in question is 33 and comes from an upper-middle-class background in Southern California, so presumably she's a lot more media and tech savvy than this 52-year-old novelist and novice blogger, but even I know that any author who makes extraordinary claims about his or her life is going to be put through the Internet wringer. There's a larger issue to be explored here about the veracity of any memoir; surely Casanova's memoirs aren't the unvarnished truth, and for all we know, even St. Augustine's Confessions contain a few exaggerations for effect. And there's even a pretty convincing argument to be made in defense of the literary merit of shading the truth, or even of lying, if it makes a better story. Should we even care if Nabokov is telling the truth in Speak, Memory? But the fact remains that in the world of the contemporary commercial confessional, thrill hungry readers for some reason demand the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
I wonder if some of these books are written as novels, and if maybe ambitious first-time authors aren't pressured by equally ambitious editors into publishing them as memoirs. I personally know of at least one memoir (and I ain't saying which one) where that's the case. It's a cheap effect to juice up a narrative by claiming it's true, but it's an effective one, I suppose. The same behavior that's so riveting on Jerry Springer would just seem contrived and cliched as a fictional narrative. We expect orginality, creativity, and insight from fiction (from the best of it, anyway), but we are thoroughly entertained by the cliches of reality.
The other thing that interests me about this particular case is that Ms. Seltzer wasn't actually caught by some journalist or blogger, but had her cover blown by her own sister, who is fourteen years older. Speaking purely pruriently (i.e., speaking as a novelist), that's the story, and the family dynamic, I'd like to read about. If Ms. Seltzer needs a new subject, I suggest she plan to write about her family's next Thanksgiving dinner in Sherman Oaks. Now that would be revealing.
And this just in, from today's Times: the pro forma tales of woe from the agent, editor, and publisher of the book.
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