Lies, Damned Lies and Memoirs

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ... who? The author, and who else? Publishers? Readers?

Margaret B. Jones, white/Native American foster child growing up with black family amid gangbangers in South LA, pens Love and Consequences, an acclaimed memoir. Now she's outed as a fake, as Margaret Seltzer, a privately schooled white girl from Sherman Oaks, who, as "Jones,'' gave a broadcast interview about her book in tough-girl cadences.

Been there, done that, homegirl. Twenty-five years ago, East LA homeboy Danny Santiago wrote his own story, a novel called Famous All Over Town, about his get-down life running with the wild boys. It was a very good book. It won awards; it was part of a song lyric; it was required reading in schools, literature from a real East LA life.

And it too, was fake. Danny Santiago was Daniel James, a septuagenarian once-blacklisted screenwriter who had worked on the Chaplin tour de force, The Great Dictator. He had also done social work in the 1950s and '60s among LA's Latinos, which is how he knew something of what he wrote.

Margaret Seltzer says she did her research by listening to her friends' tales, and tapping out her book sitting among Black Panthers and just regular kids at a Starbucks in South LA. [She was quoted as saying the Starbucks is at Crenshaw and Stockyard; the street is ''Stocker,'' and it's in a very nice neighborhood. Either the New York Times got the street name wrong, or she did.]

Both authors were outed -- Seltzer, after the glowing reviews for Love and Consequences started coming out but before her book tour was to begin this week, and James, not for a long while, not until the novel had won awards and been acclaimed as an authentic new Latino voice.

We expect actors to make us think he is someone or something else. We don't mind when female novelists write feelingly about male characters, and vice versa. Old writers create touching young characters, and sometimes vice versa. But we know the author's age, and gender, and that it's a novel we're reading, a movie we're seeing.

Only the memoir sets up itself, and us, for hopes and disappointment. Would Love and Consequences have been published and praised if it had been called a novel? Especially one written by a privileged white woman? Does our hunger for ''true stories'' feed this phony memoir machine?

The judges who gave Famous a literary prize were to have considered only literary merit, but supposedly admitted later that if they'd known the author was an old white guy and not a young Latino, they might have had second thoughts.

What's the difference? And why does it matter to us?

You tell me.

Comments

[Phaedrusnyc]

Should it matter whether a story is "true" or not? If you care about writers working hard to craft good, "real" stories, it should. The fact is, publishers and readers nowadays would rather have "authenticity" then quality, and the art of writing has suffered. Why? Because stories that are supposedly "true" can get away with ridiculous plot twists, cliched motivations and dialogue, and unrealistic situations that would simply never be accepted in fiction- or would, at the very least, be mocked for being hackwork. A writer of fiction doesn't have to work hard to make his story "real" if he simply SAYS its "real"- and the Oprahs of the world will lap it up and pass it around.
I don't entirely blame the authors for this- the publishers of the world are equally responsible for this wave of bad "non-fiction". If we live in a world that considers fiction "less important" than non-fiction, a fiction writer, whether he or she is good or not, ends up in a bind. If a publisher believes it is easier to promote "true stories" (and it probably is- call it "The Oprah Effect"), then it makes sense that a desperate writer of fiction who has had no luck selling his or her manuscript might decide that changing the lead character's name to one's own and claiming that the work is based on "reality" is the proper course. Good fiction and good nonfiction both have a place in the world- and many times the best fiction is much more "true" than the best memoirs. The publishing industry and the reading public need to remember this- as long as the standard of writing in a so-called "memoir" has to meet a lower bar than that of "fiction," there will be many, many, more Margaret Joneses, James Freys, and JT Leroys.