The Daily Telegraph thinks the “Love and Consequences” debacle, following other made up personal tales of drug addiction, Holocaust suffering and priestly rape, may mean the end of the ‘misery memoir.’
I’m not so sanguine; just as readers love to see the rich and famous brought down, they also appreciate seeing people in gothic straits.
Because the life of a writer is not all that interesting (who would pay to read about someone staring into a computer screen?), the pressure comes for exciting ‘true stories’. And the decline and desperation of the publishing industry is shown by what it will do (or not do, like fact-check) to deliver these ‘authentic experiences.’
Writers are also entertainers, although almost comically unfit for the role, crippled by depression, self-doubt, procrastination, over-thinking, research mania, envy and all other manner of self-loathing. Yet they strive to give the people (especially their editors) what they want.
The latest disaster to result is ”Love and Consequences”, Margaret B. Jones’ “autobiography” about growing up among gangbangers, by a half-white, half-Native American girl sent to foster care in South Central LA after a sexual assault at age five. (Even typing that florid description, my bullshit detector is beeping.) The memoir was actually written by Margaret Seltzer, a white woman from Sherman Oaks who went to Campbell Hall, a private high school that costs over $20,000 a year.
Hell hath no fury like a newspaper scorned: the NY Times article exposing the fraud refers to Seltzer as “all white”. (Imagine calling Shaquille O’Neal “all black”.) Like the publisher, The Times has a big credibility problem, because the woman’s editor is the daughter of a NY Times editor who had run the book review section, and the Times gave the book a rave review. The Times also has to answer for this handjob of a story and slideshow.
The Times didn’t even break the fraud story–Jones/Seltzer’s sister called the publishing house, saying this “could have and should have been stopped by now.” She’s right–except that no one in the chain wanted to make a single phone call to check this ’story that’s too good to check.’
Equally repugnant, last week “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was exposed as a . “She didn’t live with a pack of wolves to escape the Nazis. She didn’t trek 1,900 miles across Europe in search of her deported parents, nor kill a German soldier in self-defense. She’s not even Jewish.”
Can you say–exploitation?
We could explore why these women felt their own experience wasn’t authentic enough to write about, so they had to borrow other’s suffering. But the larger question is why should people believe anything they read when writers–and publishers–do this? Why, in fact, should they read at all?
As a writer, you should be able to speak in other people’s voices, even say that voice is one of your own voices. What you can’t say is that you are that other person.
What these ‘writers’ are saying is “I felt like a Jew…I felt like a gangbanger…’ therefore I can poach their experience, turn their trauma into a story I can sell.
My father said at the end of the day, a man’s reputation is all he has. To these writers and their enablers, reputation, truth and honesty are encumbrances to be thrown off in pursuit of fame and success.