In case you haven’t heard by now, another James Frey-esque memoir scandal has recently rocked the publishing world.  This time the ne’er do well is Margaret B. Jones (aka Peggy Seltzer), and she poses as a half-white, half-Native American foster child, navigating the streets of South-Central Los Angeles, running drugs for the gang-banging Bloodsand in Love and Consequences.

 
Photo by Erwin Thieme

According to the New York Times,

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.

 The author’s defense, in an interview with the Times: 

“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.”

Not surprisingly, the blame-game is in full swing.  Culprits include her publisher, Riverhead Books, who sparked a discussion in the blogosphere over whether it would be insulting and divisive to the publisher-author relationship to subject a nonfiction author to fact-checking.  Sharing the blame is reality t.v. — because, after all, who knows what’s real anymore?  And since Seltzer was posing as a racial minority, society’s subliminal racism must be taken to task as well.  Last but not least, what’s an agent to do if memoirs sell better than fiction?  Must be the consumer’s fault.  And, after all, Everyone else is doing it…

I still have vivid memories of the James Frey bloodbath on Oprah — horrifying to witness, not to mention embarassing for all involved.  However, I really enjoyed A Million Little Pieces — and even read My Friend Leonard after witnessing his brow-beating.  (After reading A New Earth, I wonder if Oprah would’ve approached Frey’s “ego” differently now…?).  Anyway, the fact is, James Frey is a compelling story teller.  Period.  He just failed to clarify that he was writing creative nonfiction.

One of my favorite genres, I first studied creative nonfiction at Hamline University during my graduate work and was fascinated by the genre.  We studied Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior and I loved it.  Soon after, I had the pleasure of teaching Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to my A.P. students.  They loved the book, until they learned O’Brien the author didn’t actually have a daughter.  This discrepancy really upset them — “How can we believe any of it now?!  He’s lost all credibility!”  (Trust me, I introduced his novel much differently the second time around…).

So, I wonder if the genre of memoir should be subsumed into the genre of creative nonfiction?  Maybe keep biography intact (and purely factual), but assume that our personal story is told through our perspective and this perspective may not always gel with that of our family (Seltzer’s sister exposed her) — or that the one night in jail felt like a week and therefore would be better represented as such? 

Maybe I’m going too far…  but I love fiction to the extent that I assume authentic writing tells its own — usually universal — truth, and the specific facts aren’t nearly as important as the significant facts.  So maybe we just need to represent “truth” differently…?

 What do you think?

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