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Author admits acclaimed memoir is fantasy


Flashermac

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In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret Jones wrote about her life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South Central Los Angeles as a foster child who ran drugs for members of the Bloods, an infamous gang. The author's biography on the back flap says she graduated from the University of Oregon.

 

The problem is that none of that is true.

 

Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, actually is all white and grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. She is still a few credits short of a diploma from University of Oregon.

 

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published "Love and Consequences," is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Seltzer's book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Oregon, where she currently lives.

 

 

Maybe she should be a politician

 

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They just shift the books from the non-fiction to the fiction shelf.

There was one in Australia, "The Hand that Signed the Paper" by Helen Demidenko that won a major prize that was all crap, and I just read a review of a book by a former little Jewish girl who claimed she spent WW2 living with a pack of wolves that's suddenly been shown to have more holes than a Swiss cheese.

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I think the books are published on literary merit.

If they were newspaper articles the sources would be carefully checked, but the first book I mentioned won the Miles Franklin Award and was also controversial in that it was condemned as anti Semitic. (One of her alledged uncles was a Ukranian Nazi Einsatzgruppen death squad member).

When the scam came out the author just stuck her nose in the air and got on with her life. Kept the prize as well I believe.

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