When I moved from New York to Los Angeles, the man I moved here for affixed a pin to his cap that read, “WE DON’T CARE HOW THEY DO IT IN NEW YORK.” Evidently, he’d had enough of what I considered my unassailable rightness. As someone who spent her first 24 years in New York City, I assumed I knew everything: how to cross the street, what pizza is supposed to taste like, the worth of anything worth knowing, and wasn’t my boyfriend fortunate I’d shown up to save him from his ignorance. The pin was his response.
The ensuing years in Los Angeles taught me there is no one more provincial than a native New Yorker, a point driven home in 2001, when I cruised the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with my editor from St. Martin’s Press, a stylish, pregnant Manhattanite who, as we passed the hundreds of book-booths snaking the UCLA campus, with some perplexity commented, “I had no idea people in Los Angeles read so many books.” It seemed to trouble her, vaguely, and I knew I’d become at least a quasi-Angeleno when I needed to stop myself from replying, “Why, yes, the Wells Fargo wagon drops them off with the provisions, and have you heard of this one called The Good Earth?”
And so, I am taking some not small glee in the tsunami-like fallout over "Love and Consequences," the latest faked memoir by one Peggy Seltzer – a white girl raised by her family in Sherman Oaks and graduate of the private school Campbell Hall – who published under the name Margaret B. Jones, a half Native-American, half-white girl fostered out at age five, to a black family in gang-infested South Central Los Angeles.
I read the review of this book last week in the New York Times, and within an hour, emailed my editor at the LA Weekly:
I know I've been in the trenches with Laura Albert but:· Signs of sexual abuse discovered when she arrives at school with blood on her panties?
· Moves into South-Central with a foster mother named Big Mom?
· Grows up amidst and is schooled by the Bloods but “finds love with, of all men, a Crip,” with whom she lives in a small Oregon town?
· One of her many friends in prison writes her: “So few of us will ever get the chance to see what it's like outside LA... be our eyes”? (!!!)Has Jones at all been on your radar?
This last, because Jones would have been on his radar. Had this girl fought her way up and out through her writing, someone with his or her eye on the book scene in Los Angeles would have heard about her, at a party, a conference, via a tip from a writer; the newspaper. But there’d been nothing, and my editor agreed, it sounded a lot like Navahoax.
The book, based on the review by Michiku Kakutani, strained all credibility; the characters, dialogue, heartbreaks and denouement were stereotypical to the point of cartoonish. It eluded me how Kakutani could characterize the work as, “humane and deeply effecting.” Reading a follow-up piece in the Times, by Mimi Read, who with a straight face quoted Jones as saying, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot,” I thought, how is it possible that a New York Times reporter believes this?
When the book was exposed, nearly in real time, as a hoax, I figured out at least one of the reasons why those in New York who’d bought and published and lauded "Love and Consequences" were able to do so with a clear-ish conscience: the stories did not sound made-up to them. To a New Yorker, black foster mothers in South Central are, naturally, called Big Mom. Little girls who’ve been sexually abused show up with blood on their panties. And do 13-year-olds buy their own burial plots? In LA, they do. And if those pesky things called “facts” couldn’t be checked, it’s not their fault, but the fault of Jones’s family members and friends all being dead or in prison. Duh.
Of course, we’re now seeing the back peddling, the second-guessing; the mea culpas. The book’s editor, Sarah McGrath, did not in three years of working on the book meet Seltzer. The book’s literary agent, Faye Bender, was quoted this week as saying, “There was no reason to doubt [Seltzer], ever.” This, though Seltzer lied about her race, family, education; about life, death, sexual abuse, guns, and drugs. Ira Silverberg, the agent who represents the under-fire Ishmael Beah and who also represented JT LeRoy, whom he never met (but who told me he would not have represented Laura Albert, whom he did meet, “because I find her unpleasant”), feels, “It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail.”
And Nan A. Talese, who published the sine qua non of the genre, James Frey’s "A Million Little Pieces," doesn’t like the idea of double-checking an author. “I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book,” she told the Times. “It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.”
Funny, I’ve never been insulted when asked by an editor to check facts, but anyway, this is not really about fact checking; I don’t personally care if someone writes he ate a Pink’s hot dog with grilled onions in March, when actually it was a chili dog in May. What I care about is that the writer – of fiction or memoir – is telling the truth as best he or she can, and I think this is what editors care about, too, or should. Those in New York who do, in fact, wield so much influence; who have such a vast range of culture to choose from and to disseminate, need to have the guts and aptitude to admit, they might not know enough about a subject or region to know whether what they’re reading is the truth, and then, summon the curiosity to find out.