In Love and Consequences, a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. The problem is that none of it is true.Margaret B Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published Love and Consequences, is recalling all copies of the book and has cancelled Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Oregon, where she currently lives.In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles. “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,” 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.”The revelations of Seltzer’s mendacity came in the wake of the news last week that a Holocaust memoir, Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca, was a fake, and perhaps more notoriously, two years ago James Frey, the author of a best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, admitted that he had made up or exaggerated details in his account of his drug addiction and recovery.Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Seltzer and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Seltzer’s older sister, Cyndi Hoffman, saw the article and called Riverhead to tell editors that Seltzer’s story was untrue.Love and Consequences immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”
