Margaret B. Jones, Lying Whore

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Margaret B. Jones, author of the short-lived but well-received new memoir of hardscrabble life on the mean streets of South Central L.A., Love and Consequences, is not Margaret B. Jones at all. She’s Margaret Seltzer, imaginative product of the genteel streets and prep schools of Sherman Oaks. No, she did not receive a gun for her fourteenth birthday. No, she did not start selling drugs for the Bloods as a pre-adolescent. And no, she is not half-American-Indian. She’s pure honky bullshitter.

Though much of the fervor has waned by now, some people are still taking this story pretty hard. In a letter to the New York Times, one reader opined that “[Seltzer's] deception is not only a betrayal of her editor and publisher, it is also a betrayal of the community of readers and writers — a community that relies on trust to share truth and meaning.”

I’m a little baffled by this person’s characterization of the “community” of writers, with all its truth and meaning and trust and sharing. Sounds more like an AA support group to me. The community of writers I’m familiar with is the most self-absorbed, neurotic bunch of liars you’re likely to meet. As someone with literary ambitions, you have to assume Seltzer has a bit of the huckster in her. As someone with literary ambitions and from L.A., I’d say she probably bleeds bullshit.

But I also think she’s getting a bad rap (though I’m constantly re-evaluating that stance as we learn more about her illusory enterprises). We should really be praising Seltzer for her restraint. At least she didn’t let loose any truly off-the-handle bullshit, like that she was raised by Nazi-hating wolves. Nor should we have been entirely blindsided. A few prescient readers had some inkling of the book’s fraudulence. Michiko Kakutani of the Times praised the book for its humanity before noting that it seemed at times as if the author were “self-consciously novelizing.” “Self-consciously,” it turns out, is a superfluous modifier here.

Despite the hullabaloo, it seems not everyone is hopping mad enough to condemn or banish or lynch Seltzer for her deceit. In a number of forums I saw posts that advocated the merits of the book regardless of what was printed on the cover. Indeed, if you delete the genre and author bio it doesn’t change the text. But would it still be a lie? Or would it just be fiction?

I’m sure we all remember a similar scandal a few years ago in James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. Frey played it conservatively; he smudged and stretched a few details rather than outrightly invent a persona and a life. I’m sure we also remember Oprah’s impromptu phone-in to the Larry King Live Show to defend the author whose book received her endorsement, commenting that, hey, a good story is a good story and let’s give the guy a break for blurring the lines.

And so it was that Frey looked more than a little stunned when, shortly thereafter, Oprah did everything short of give him the kiss of death on her own show. Here you had the woman who, days before, appeared to be his only ally (verily, his life raft in shark-infested waters) becoming his fiercest enemy (the gunner’s mate aboard the big-ass destroyer intent on seriously compromising the buoyancy of his flotation device).

One pauses, of course, at the motive for Oprah’s about-face. Did she really, upon examining all the evidence and mulling it over, conclude that she’d been irreparably betrayed? Or was she responding, with typical Oprah savvy and calculation, to the pronounced ire of her fans, who might feel doubly betrayed if she, by whose recommendation they read that malicious heap of disingenuous half- or for-the-most-part-truths, did not share in their feelings of betrayal?

Or was she just pulling the old tyrannical bait-and-switch, the old “I might give away cars and houses and girls’ schools with psychopathic zeal, like as if I were so generous I might invade Poland just to give away their stuff, but as Oprah giveth so can Oprah taketh away, and I will not hesitate to crush and ruin and immolate you if I so fancy. To demonstrate. . .” ?

If we were to take any lessons from the James Frey ordeal, this last one seems to be the only one we internalized. We did not bother to ask, as the Jones/Seltzer fiasco makes clear, how our understanding of the author bears on the words on the page, how alterations in that understanding can alter our experience of the text. This is why Seltzer, a promising, if not stellar, talent, will likely never again be published at any significant level. Nor will Frey. This is also probably why Brocke Clarke, in his clever but flawed satire of the current memoir fever, An Arsonist’s Guide to Writer’s Homes in New England, felt compelled to emphatically stress in several places in or near the front matter, that his book was in no way intended to be read as memoir, even though it was pretty clearly intended to be read as memoir.

In defense, though not quite apologia, of her ruse, Seltzer explained that she was merely trying “to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to” (with syntax like that, one suspects her editors’ failings extend beyond the fact-checking department). One might ask why she did not choose the more sensible option of putting a voice to these people in the form of a novel. One will then have to be ashamed that Seltzer, for all her lack of foresight, understood something One overlooked about the marketability of said novel: Every critic (and most readers) in the country would be exhausting themselves trying to scribe the most caustic dismissal of the whitebread preppie from Sherman Oaks and her vulgar condescension of street life.

Of course, Love and Consequences was vulgar and condescending, and that is one legitimate reason for people to be pissed off at Seltzer. Being taken for a ride, however, is not. Being all-white and well-to-do does not make her characterizations any less “humane” or “affecting.” Just like being a half-Indian crack dealer would not justify her clunky, contrived dialog or self-conscious novelizing.

There was a time when lying to the reader was considered an art rather than a crime. The only substantial difference between Nabokov and Seltzer was that Nabokov wasn’t a shitty writer.

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Tags: James Frey, lies, literary fraud, Margaret B. Jones, Margaret Seltzer, memoir, Oprah, whore