The book publishing industry, through its apparent refusal to hire fact checkers, has single-handedly changed the definition of “memoir.” A memoir used to mean one’s own personal story; one that couldn’t happen to anyone else because it happened to the author. These days, however, it’s good enough for an author to believe, or feel strongly, that it happened.
Last week, Riverhead Books, a unit of Penguin Group USA, published “Love and Consequences,” a critically acclaimed memoir. This week, the publisher is busy recalling all copies. The memoir, by Margaret B. Jones, is about her life as a half-white, half-Native American foster child growing up in South-Central Los Angeles, living among gangs and running drugs for the Bloods.
The memoir, three years in the writing, was immediately debunked by the author’s sister after a profile of her appeared in the New York Times. Cyndi Hoffman identified the memoirist as her sister, Margaret Seltzer, who is white and grew up in a well-to-do Los Angeles suburb with her biological family and attended private school.
Now of course Seltzer says she’s sorry (but it was the only way to get the story out). Her editor, Sarah McGrath, says, “There’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one.”
“I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story has never changed. All the details have been the same,” McGrath said. Well, what more proof do you need? After the denouncement, McGrath called Seltzer “naïve.” Perhaps that goes both ways. (“Hey, on the phone, and on paper, she really sounded like a former gang banger.”)
The episode comes on the heels of the news that a Holocaust memoir, “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years,” by Misha Defonseca, was also made up. Published is 1997, “Misha” is about a Jewish girl from Brussels who walked across Europe by herself during World War II and spent months living in the forest, sometimes among wolves. Before it was published, two historians warned the publisher that the work was fantasy. Never mind.
It turns out Misha Defonseca is really Monique De Wael, orphaned daughter of two Catholic members of the Belgian resistance.
Before Seltzer and De Wael, it was James Frey, making up details in his book, “A Million Little Pieces,” his “memoir” of his drug addiction and recovery.
The story of Misha, De Wael helpfully explained, “Is not actual reality, but was my reality, my way of surviving.”
Whatever. Apparently there’s no cache in writing fiction anymore. But the absence of fact-checking doesn’t turn fantasy into reality.
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