Margaret P. Jones didn’t even make it to Oprah’s couch - yet alone her book club - before she was outed as a fraud.

Jones, the pseudonym for Oregon resident Margaret Seltzer was the author of a highly anticipated and much lauded memoir, Love and Consequences which was released last week - and promply recalled - by Riverhead Books. The book, which was promoted as an account of Seltzer’s life as a half-white, half-Native adoptee who grew up in South Central Los Angeles and eventually ran drugs for the notorious gang, The Bloods. On top of fabricating ‘runnin’ wild on the streets,’ she also lied about graduating from the University of Oregon.

Seltzer is not the only person who has been caught fabricating events in order to serve up a provocative story. One of the more well-known frauds was James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and more recently, there was a book by Misha Defonseca who posed as a Holocaust survivor. But what makes Seltzer’s story stand out is her reticence (with a patronizing tone) when admitting, despite almost immediately acknowledging that she didn’t actually experience what she said she did in her book, that what she did was morally wrong:

“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.”

According to the editor of Love and Consequences Sarah McGrath, there was a bit of manipulation added in order to validate the story and Seltzer’s presumed hard life;

“It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said.

Please note that Seltzer was given a $100,000 advance. Oh, and there is this tidbit:

Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, referred to the International Brother/SisterHood in the author biography that appeared on the back flap of the book…… With help from her agent, Faye Bender, Ms. Seltzer also set up a Web site, brothersisterhood.com, in October to describe the foundation and promote her book. Since the revelations about the book, however, Ms. Bender has taken down the Web site.

No record of the foundation could be found with the Internal Revenue Service or the states of Oregon, where Ms. Seltzer lives, or California.
Ms. Bender said she helped set up Ms. Seltzer’s foundation Web site because the author said she lacked money to buy Internet server space. “She explained several times that it was a budding organization,” Ms. Bender said. “She said that the people involved were gang members and they were working to help other gang members and help other kids not get into gangs”…….Leaders of several other groups combating gang violence in Los Angeles who were listed on Ms. Seltzer’s Web site said they did not know of the International Brother/SisterHood or of Ms. Seltzer or Margaret B. Jones."

What’s also interesting is the act of cultural appropriation and the willingness of Seltzer to fabricate her ethnicity and class status in order to sell a book. Seltzer is a white woman who, lived in an upper-class with her biological, two-parent family and attended a private school. She admitted that the stories in her book came from her time working one the streets……trying to eradicate gang violence.

Cultural appropriation is a sticky subject. Dare us colored folk complain? Yes, sometimes our stories – stories that need to be told and thrown into the world, are indeed told….just by someone else that is deemed more socially palatable. The thought that it was more pleasing to have a white person tell the story of a person of color caused me to abandon Arthur Golden’s Memoirs of a Geisha written by a white man in the voice of a young Asian woman, leaving the book to grow dust on my bookshelf. Maybe it is simply 'reality' that granted, while these stories are being told and sold, the only way they will be reach the public sphere is if we aren’t the ones telling them. From Karnythia over at The Angry Black woman:

Meanwhile the legitimate work of POC writers that have survived adversity like Felicia “Snoop” Pearson barely rates a mention from the critics and certainly doesn’t get the author a $100,000 advance and a book tour. Just once I’d like the acclaimed voice of the poor inner city kids to be a poor inner city kid, and not some white person looking to make a buck off the community. Is that so much to ask? Can the fabulous writers that come from our communities be the voices of our communities? Or does White America really need appropriation in order to connect with the reality of life as a POC? We’re here, we can speak for ourselves and if you can’t manage to listen? That’s your problem. Our work might not feed into all those comfortable stereotypes that this book did, but then there’s a reason this book is little more than the fantasies of a privileged white woman looking to for bigger and better ways to stroke her own ego.

On the other hand, as a writer who is starting work on my second book, I understand how difficult it is to get published. It is not enough to “write what you know” and get published, most writers looking for a publication deal with a major publishing company unfortunately have to acknowledge the trends and manipulate your work into a (sellable) piece of art. From Beccar’s Weblog:

I think that Margaret Seltzer, like most writers, knew how hard it is to get published and she thought the best way to do that would be by saying it was her own story, not a fictional one. I am not justifying her. She did a bad thing and now she’s paying for it. I just understand how frustrating it is to have to beat your own drum and not get noticed unless you do something like what she’s done.

Yeah, would you say the same thing to Jayson Blair? While I understand the fustration, there is something that is more important to me. It's called having a clear conscience.