Kevin Allman

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the video

Journalist Harry Allen has uncovered a fascinating piece of the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer puzzle: a video that seems to be a promotional vehicle for her now-discredited memoir Love and Consequences:

These days, publishers often commission promo videos to be posted on MySpace or YouTube; I don't know if they really help sales, but they're cheap to produce and they can't hurt. As Harry explains:

It seems to have been shot as part of a companion “electronic press kit,” or EPK, for the disgraced author’s quickly-canceled book tour and publicity campaign. (In the wake of the outrageous controversy, Riverhead recalled all of the 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences it had previously shipped, from a 24,000 total copies printed, the sum of which were then certainly pulped.)

Harry's shrewd, funny analysis of the video is well worth reading (and you've got to see the picture of Sister Souljones' high school graduation pic to believe it), but I'm not sure the vid was shot in South Central L.A., as he hypothesizes. It's certainly not Eugene, Ore. -- the palm trees in the background are pure L.A. -- but the tract houses in the background are more Brady Bunch than Watts (check the spiffy landscaping and the lack of bars on the windows).

The biggest "tell" in the whole thing, though, is the fact that Jones/Seltzer just sits there for all 10 minutes of the video. I've seen a lot of these publishers' promos, and they usually involve an author walking around, telling stories from their memoirs on the sites where the stories occurred.

Jones/Seltzer couldn't walk around and bring her story to life -- because it was an easily disprovable pack of lies. No street corner locations where she dealt rock; no battered-but-humble family home where "Big Mama" dished out neckbones and homespun wisdom in equal measure. So she just sits there like she was being interviewed on the Today show, a white woman in front of some well-kept houses, talking in vague generalities about education and "potential" and inspiration.

It makes me wonder what it would take for Riverhead to have smelled a rat in this story -- or, indeed, in how much denial the publisher was willing to engage not to smell a rat.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: Galleycat weighs in

Mediabistro's Galleycat weighs in (again) on Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer, and her real life as an Oregon ecotopian vs. her fake life as The Palest Li'l Gangbanger of 'Em All:

...[T]he kind of money she got from Riverhead for being a sexually abused Native American raised by a kindly black woman in South Central is probably much more than she would've gotten from anybody for being a disenchanted private school student who moves in with a bunch of radical greens and reinvents herself as a persecuted minority.

Yep. As in any publishing scam -- follow the money, honey.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the eco-connection gets deeper

John Minervini of Willamette Week picked up on my reporting on the eco-saboteur connection in the whole Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer affair, and has an eye-opening piece on the paper's blog about Jones/Seltzer's connection to the Oregon eco-underground:

Remember Peggy Seltzer, a.k.a. Margaret Jones?  The lady from Eugene who wrote a fake memoir about growin’ up in the hood?  Well, WW’s been doing some sleuthing, and it turns out that the real Peggy Seltzer—a sort of failed environmental activist and part-time anarchist—is possibly more interesting than the fake one.

Based on a tip from former WW writer Kevin Allman, Willamette Week contacted representatives from the campaign to free Jeff “Free” Luers....It turns out that Peggy Seltzer was not only involved with the campaign to free Jeff Luers—for a time, she was at its center.

Minervini quotes an anonymous source about Jones/Seltzer:

Her involvement basically consisted of manipulating people, lying, pitting people against each other, taking on more responsibility than she should have and then dropping the ball on everything completely. Fuck her.

Meanwhile, Mediabistro's tart, excellent Kate Coe asks what I think is the big question:

There's so much more to this story than her tawdry little memoir. Wouldn't it be great if some investigative reporter took a look?

Why, yes, indeedy, it would. Now that the major papers who swallowed her line of bull have 'fessed up and self-flagellated, a follow-up piece would be quite in order. And, no doubt, fascinating.

April Fooling the news

'Tis the day for newspaper and radio prankery...

Media around the world regaled their audiences with stories of stretched French presidents and bisexual James Bonds on Tuesday, proving the tradition of April Fool's jokes was alive and kicking.

Britain's Daily Telegraph printed pictures of penguins apparently flying to the Amazon, while many papers ran a spoof story saying luxury carmaker BMW had invented a model that electrocuted dogs which tried to relieve themselves against its wheels.

Australian radio station 2UE marked April 1 by reporting that the pope would conduct a special mass for homosexuals during his visit Down Under in July....

Other British newspapers got in on the act -- the tabloid Daily Star said rugged James Bond star Daniel Craig wanted 007 to "swing both ways", while the Daily Express said one of London's best-known monuments, Big Ben, was using a digital clock while its traditional timepiece was repaired.

I think this could be a Get Out of Jail Free card for The New York Times and the L.A. Times. Those stories about Sean "Puffy" Combs being a murderer, and that profile of a gang-member memoirist who turned out to be a Valley Girl? Just early April Fool's.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: Publishers Weekly gets it

Brava to Sara Nelson, editor of Publishers Weekly, who takes a gimlet-eyed look at the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer debacle and concludes that the publishing industry owes more to its consumers than a million little excuses and a "mistakes were made" shrug:

...I also think it's time we, as an industry, checked on another set of facts: that there are a lot of potential liars looking for book deals, that the reality show–obsessed public has upped the ante for more and more outrageous “real stories” that we may be all too anxious to provide and, not incidentally, that we're losing credibility with our audience with every scandal....

But publishing remains its old credulous self, falling back on bromides about “trusting the author” and “the smell test,” and the argument that being more inquisitive would be too expensive. And while it's true that these disasters are only a small fraction of the good, well-researched memoirs we publish every year, they have a lasting and perhaps cumulative impact. In these post-Frey, Google-able times, being more, not less, skeptical is not only the right thing to do, it's the expedient thing: you can bet that a mistake or misrepresentation is going to be discovered, sooner or later—so why not protect yourself in advance from the inevitable pillorying? I think we can all agree that the one thing the book business doesn't need right now is less faith from readers.

Nelson has written a terrific, thoughtful essay, rich in common sense and basic decency, and the whole thing is well worth reading.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: truthiness and beauty

You'd think there couldn't be a new angle on the Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer story, but then again, you probably haven't met the woman's former literature professor, Gordon Sayre of the University of Oregon in Eugene. Professor Sayre remembers Mama in this morning's Eugene Register-Guard:

In 2001 Peggy Seltzer, aka Margaret Jones, was a student in my course on Native American literature. We kept in touch from time to time, and last month I received an advance copy of her book Love and Consequences....

When early on the morning of March 4 I went out to get the newspaper and learned that I had read a novel, not a memoir, I was neither angry nor disappointed. If Peggy’s assertion that she had spent part of her childhood on the Quinault reservation was untrue, if the paper she had written about this experience was based on false premises, at least it was backed up by enough research to be convincing.

Lord have mercy. As Kate Coe puts it on Fishbowl LA:

There's a moral assertion--lying is okay, provided you're good at it. Or else, a professor of Native American literature knows little or nothing about the lives of actual Native Americans.

What says Professor Sayre (who teaches a course called "Early American Ethnic Autobiography")?

Every memoir or autobiography is an individual’s fashioning of his or her life, directed toward that individual’s conception of audience. The more intimate or psychological the events recounted — of childhood trauma, of addiction, of religious conversion, or even of racial identity — the more ludicrous it is for readers to insist upon documentary truth.

Actually, 'ludicrous' is when a literature professor prefers documentary truthiness to documentary truth. What kind of education are those U of O kids getting for their parents' money, anyway?

Despite his defensiveness, I'm sure Sayre knows the difference, at least at some level. Even the most fusspot of critics wouldn't be hanging Seltzer out to dry if she had simply misremembered a fact or two: misidentifying a Tercel as a Corolla, or setting a scene in 1988 when it was 1989, or calling the neighbor lady Miss Mary Jane when she was Miss Martha Joan. Jones/Seltzer, of course, did none of those things; she constructed a story and a persona that was nothing but a lie...a distinction that's obvious to nearly everyone but Professor Sayre:

[I]t is no accident that the notorious recent memoirists J.T. Leroy and James Frey also wrote accounts of lives on the margins of society, feeding readers’ lurid curiosities or morbid fascinations.

JT LeRoy wasn't a memoirist, but Sayre's already said that he doesn't know, or care, about the difference;  using his yardstick,The Diary of Anne Frank could've been a fictional account written by Jackie Collins, and as long as Jackie got the sound of the jackboots right, who dare insist on 'documentary truth'?

Sayre's essay, though, is a good reminder that fabulists don't work in a vacuum; for every habitual liar, there's a habitual lie-ee, someone who listens and believes and rationalizes and, when the truth eventually emerges, enters into the role of enabler.

How much did Professor Sayre believe Peggy Seltzer? Enough to thank her in the acknowledgements of his book The Indian Chief as Tragic Hero (hat tip, again, Kate Coe) -- a detail he left out of his Register-Guard essay:

...and Peggy Seltzer of the Quinault nation alerted me to the annual ride of the Sioux and inspired my teaching of Native American literature at Oregon.

I can see why he wouldn't want to brag about that. What I can't see is why he'd write an admiring newspaper essay about the woman, all these years later. (See: enabler.)

Beauty is truthiness, truthiness beauty; that is all ye know in Professor Sayre's class, and all ye need to know. Seltzer seemed to learn that very well, but it didn't serve her well in the end, of course, since the real world and Professor Gordon Sayre's class at the University of Oregon are two very different things...and thank God for that.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: people are still talking

• Christopher Caldwell in the Financial Times has an interesting insight into both Why She Did It and Why They Bought It:

She told an interviewer that her inner-city friends had said: "You should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk." But this, as it turned out, was self-delusion. It was Ms Seltzer who needed black gangstas to make her voice heard, not the other way around. People are intensely interested in the inner lives of American inner-city gang members. Rap music, the vehicle through which those inner lives are most plainly visible, has a large paying following in virtually every country in the world. The same cannot be said of the cultural products of white, middle-class creative-writing students from the San Fernando Valley.

• Sandy Banks of the L.A. Times analyzes why she found herself so offended by the whole debacle, and offers one interesting tidbit: Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer, the wannabe hardscrabble gangbanger, actually went to the same private school that educated Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.

• Undercover Black Man (aka David Mills) reads the work of the woman who introduced Jones/Seltzer to her own agent, setting the publication of her invented memoir into motion, and finds that Jones/Seltzer has been lying for a very, very long time.

• And a blogger who calls herself ExpatJane has some of the smartest observations I've read yet on the situation. An adoptee from L.A. herself and an aspiring writer, Jane writes:

I'm adopted. The hoops my black parents had to jump through to adopt me were intense. If you want to verify my story, I know L.A. county has my adoption records on file. I have them. Yes, they couldn't request them directly, but why couldn't they ask Seltzer for this stuff? Honestly, if I were writing a story about my life, I would expect the publisher to ask me for some tangible proof about my background. Jobs demand academic transcripts, but it's unreasonable for agents and publishers dealing in memoirs to ask for documents?

I know that foster parents have to go through steps too and they get reimbursed by the government for taking care of these children in need, so there are surely a good number of black foster parents. However, I'm beyond certain that social services would try their damnedest to place a white child with a white foster parent. If the child were part "whatever" then they'd try to place that child with a "whatever" foster parent, but half-white, half-Indian gets placed with a black foster mother. Were there really ever that few foster parents? Really? (The L.A. CWS's Handbook on placing children in foster care.)

Is the NYC literary scene THAT whitewashed and politically correct that they were blinded to this race issue?

Reading her blog, I think Jane's story is a hell of a lot more interesting -- and, obviously, more real -- than anything Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer could invent.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: Nishani Frazier & Michael Kinsley

In all the ink (real and virtual) that's been spilled over the Margaret Jones debacle -- little of it in the mainstream press -- Nishani Frazier left a long, thoughtful, and pointed comment on my last blog entry, a comment that's well worth reading in its entirety. I thought I'd spotlight it here, particularly her conclusion:

The building blocks of racism are notions of exclusion and perceptions of people of different races as "the other". Thus all these folks can participate in the absurd formulations of black life in LA through a white girl's eyes who "lived the life" WITHOUT asking the questions which many black people would find obvious to ask....mostly because her story is just so damn stupid. Where were the black people? No where...not among the critics, not among the journalists, not among the publishing house...and most importantly people---- NOT in that book she wrote.

Meanwhile, how it's not done: Michael Kinsley dashed off 750 words on the topic for his Time magazine column and called it a day. Message to Michael: if you're trying to illustrate how tone-deaf white media folks can be to black concerns, insulting Barack and Michelle Obama is precisely the way to go about it. I guess.

Margaret Jones' Diaries: today in Liarland

•  The New York Times prints a few letters to the editor about the topic under the heading "Her So-Called Life (Fact-Checking Required)". Interestingly, all four letters chosen have to do with Margaret Jones' publisher doing all the fact-checking, and not the Times....

• Nancy Rommelmann has a marvelous essay on LA Observed, musing about whether the fiasco could be chalked up to provincialism in the New York publishing world. Nancy's conclusion nails it:

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.

Indeed. But, then again, the publishing industry is so solipsistic that the Los Angeles Times even holds its own announcement ceremony for the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes in...New York. Would it hurt the publishers to put a few junior editors on a jetBlue and send them out to L.A. for a night at the Standard? Apparently so, suggests LAT book editor David Ulin:

As to why this is important, well ... like any small, insular industry, publishing can have a very narrow vision; it can be difficult to see outside the fishbowl of New York. You can bemoan this, or you can deal with it, but either way, that’s how it is. If the mountain won’t come to you, in other words, you have to go tell it on the mountain, which is why we announce the Book Prize nominations in New York.

• Kate Coe at Mediabistro's Fishbowl LA is all over it, too...and Kate knows from literary fabulists, having written the definitive article dissecting the Theresa Duncan affair....

• Galleycat has an interesting email from an anonymous book reviewer who was assigned Love and Consequences. The correspondent doesn't think that it's a reviewer's job to vet memoirs except in cases of egregious claims, and I agree.

• Last: where are the Oregon media on this tale of a Eugene writer taking the New York publishing and newspaper worlds for a ride? Jeff Baker, book editor of The Oregonian, had a good summary piece that the O wisely ran on its front page. The Eugene Register-Guard revealed that it spiked a profile of the liar when it discovered that she'd lied about her educational bona fides (which, it should be noted, is far more due diligence than The New York Times exercised).

Willamette Week ran a blog item. So did the Eugene Weekly. And the Portland Mercury made it clear that they "don’t happen to give a shit if memoirs are “true” or not," which says volumes about both the quality of their arts coverage and their editors' curiosity about anything more than a mile off E. Burnside Avenue.

Is that going to be it? I hope not, particularly given Jones' connection to the eco-saboteur Jeffrey "Free" Luers, and the news this week that he may be released from prison as early as next year after the Oregon Court of Appeals overturned his original 22-year sentence. Since the gang-outreach workers in South Central L.A. have no idea who the hell Margaret Jones is, wouldn't exploring her connections in the Oregon eco-underground be a more fertile field of inquiry?

Margaret Jones' Diaries: the eco-saboteur connection

Congratulations to Steve Huff, who seems to have uncovered a small Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer motherlode: a journal begun by the author of Love or Consequences in 2004, then abandoned until she posted one entry in early 2005...the very timeframe when she signed her contract with Riverhead Books.

It goes back to my original question: Were any actual black people involved in the publication of this book?

It's more relevant than ever -- because the Jones/Seltzer diary of 2004 has all the black-street versimilitude of one of those 17-year-old white kids who pull up next to you at a stoplight in their mother's Toyota Prius, blasting Pimp-C out the windows. Only this "kid" was a white woman in her late twenties, who was about to launch an easily disprovable hoax that would ultimately fool a prominent New York publisher and The New York Times itself:

some people would be suprised to find out where and how i grew up. the fact is who i am bekomes exceedingly unimportant. what does matter is what i kan bring to the table....

im jus a gurl...a simple one at that. i was a soldier once, but i think i am semi-retired now. dont doubt that i am doing my work still, only what that work is has changed and as someone told me once, "u are not a soldier unless u are in a war". these days im enjoyin my peace, fillin my head an hopin an pushin toward big things.

Edukation. im not talkin that white washed BS, but truth. we all need to fill our heads with something other than what is shoved at us and oviousally not workin. we need to start understandin the struggle that we are left in and how it has evolved so we understand what we do and why.

Even more weird: it seems that in 2001, Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer, who at that time was using the AOL handle "blastedagronaut," was involved in the effort to free the eco-saboteur Jeffrey "Free" Luers, who was convicted in 2000 of torching three SUVs in Jones/Seltzer's adopted hometown of Eugene, Ore.

In a bulletin dated Aug. 2001, A-Infos, a news website for self-described anarchists, lists Jones/Seltzer's email address as a contact in the effort to reduce or commute Luers' sentence:

I'd suggest that anyone trying to get to the truth of who Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer may really be might want to stop concentrating on South Central L.A. and the private schools of the San Fernando Valley...and start checking around the eco-communities of Eugene, Ore.