Archive for the &;Margaret-Seltzer&; Category
Why Writers Lie: The GoodNews
March 5, 2008
The Daily Telegraph thinks the &;Love and Consequences&; debacle, following other made up personal tales of drug addiction, Holocaust suffering and priestly rape, may mean the end of the &;misery memoir.&;
I&;m not so sanguine; just as readers love to see the rich and famous brought down, they also appreciate seeing people in gothic straits.
Posted in Love-and-Consequences, Margaret-B-Jones, Margaret-Seltzer, memoir-fraud, Misha-Defonseca, peggy-seltzer, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;
Why WritersLie
March 4, 2008
Because the life of a writer is not all that interesting (who would pay to read about someone staring into a computer screen?), the pressure comes for exciting &;true stories&;. And the decline and desperation of the publishing industry is shown by what it will do (or not do, like fact-check) to deliver these &;authentic experiences.&;
Writers are also entertainers, although almost comically unfit for the role, crippled by depression, self-doubt, procrastination, over-thinking, research mania, envy and all other manner of self-loathing. Yet they strive to give the people (especially their editors) what they want.
The latest disaster to result is &;Love and Consequences&;, Margaret B. Jones&; &;autobiography&; about growing up among gangbangers, by a half-white, half-Native American girl sent to foster care in South Central LA after a sexual assault at age five. (Even typing that florid description, my bullshit detector is beeping.) The memoir was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, a white woman from Sherman Oaks who went to Campbell Hall, a private high school that costs over $20,000 a year.
Hell hath no fury like a newspaper scorned: the NY Times article exposing the fraud refers to Seltzer as &;all white&;. (Imagine calling Shaquille O&;Neal &;all black&;.) Like the publisher, The Times has a big credibility problem, because the woman&;s editor is the daughter of a NY Times editor who had run the book review section, and the Times gave the book a rave review. The Times also has to answer for this handjob of a story and slideshow.
The Times didn&;t even break the fraud story&;Jones/Seltzer&;s sister called the publishing house, saying this &;could have and should have been stopped by now.&; She&;s right&;except that no one in the chain wanted to make a single phone call to check this &;story that&;s too good to check.&;
Equally repugnant, last week “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was exposed as a complete lie. &;She didn&;t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn&;t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She&;s not even Jewish.&;
Can you say&;exploitation?
We could explore why these women felt their own experience wasn&;t authentic enough to write about, so they had to borrow other&;s suffering. But the larger question is why should people believe anything they read when writers&;and publishers&;do this? Why, in fact, should they read at all?
As a writer, you should be able to speak in other people&;s voices, even say that voice is one of your own voices. What you can&;t say is that you are that other person.
What these &;writers&; are saying is &;I felt like a Jew&;I felt like a gangbanger&;&; therefore I can poach their experience, turn their trauma into a story I can sell.
My father said at the end of the day, a man&;s reputation is all he has. To these writers and their enablers, reputation, truth and honesty are encumbrances to be thrown off in pursuit of fame and success.
Posted in Love-and-Consequences, Margaret-B-Jones, Margaret-Seltzer, memoir-fraud, Misha-Defonseca, peggy-seltzer, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment &;