The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [102]
Mendelsohn drew attention to the borderline between memoir and fiction and on the differential value that modern readers and writers seemed to place on them as bearers of emotional and historical truth. Why do we feel so outraged and bamboozled when a memoir turns out to be a fake? Is our indignation moral, ethical, aesthetic, stylistic—or, indeed, feigned? Does the use of the memoir change or disappear when it is proved not to be true?
The number of hoax memoirs on all topics has been on the increase, with the claims ever more extravagant and exploitative. Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival was the title of a “heart-wrenching” memoir of gang life in South Central Los Angeles that turned out to be a fabrication. “Heart-wrenching” was how the book was described by a feature-article writer in a profile of the author, “Margaret B. Jones,” later revealed to be the nom de laptop of Margaret Seltzer. Here is how The New York Times feature story on the author described the book:
Her memoir is an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community. She ended up following her foster brothers into the gang, and it was only when a high school teacher urged her to apply to college that Ms. Jones even began to consider her future.14
The following week this personal biography was exposed as a hoax, the publisher, Riverhead, recalled the book and offered refunds to purchasers, and the editor and publisher said they had never met the author prior to publication, relying instead on the word of a literary agent and the author’s signed statement that she was telling the truth.
Margaret Seltzer, it turned out, had grown up with her biological family in the wealthy L.A. neighborhood of Sherman Oaks and attended Campbell Hall, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. When interviewed on the radio in connection with book promotions, Seltzer/Jones had spoken in an African-American vernacular, although she and her family are white. The publisher, editor, agent, and newspaper profiler all faced public criticism, and the press drew the expected comparisons with other hoax authors: James Frey, who fabricated the story of his supposed memoir of drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces (powerfully promoted by Oprah Winfrey), and Laura Albert, the real author behind the memoirist “J. T. LeRoy,” whose invented personal narrative described him as an addict and the son of a West Virginia prostitute. Albert went to the extreme length of having someone impersonate “LeRoy” in public, confessed to the hoax in a Paris Review interview in 2006, and was successfully sued for damages. A movie contract made with “LeRoy” was found by the courts to be null and void.
More than one commentator, including the novelist Anne Bernays, asked why Selzer didn’t just forthrightly declare her work fiction. Bernays wrote a letter to the editor of the Times:
It’s clear that Margaret Seltzer, author of “Love and Consequences,” is a gifted writer with a soaring imagination. It seems perverse, then, that she chooses to deny her destiny as a novelist.
Ms. Seltzer’s insistence that only nonfiction can “make people understand the conditions that people live in” is way off the mark.
Has she never read Charles Dickens—or even Jane Austen?15
It’s tempting to reflect on Seltzer’s title, since Love and Consequences obliquely echoes “Truth or Consequences,” the name of a long-running American quiz show. “Love” rather than “truth”; “and” rather than “or.” Is this the contemporary fantasy of “having it all,” with no repercussions? Or an example of Freud’s dictum about dreams: there is no no in the unconscious?
Novel Histories
James Frey had written a memoir that turned out to