Update #2 on this week's latest fake-memoir controversy

I really had no idea that this story would catch so much media fancy -- here's a recap from the Associated Press (via CNN), and another in the online edition of Newsweek.

A few more thoughts:

• Publishers Weekly has reaction from the duped publisher, Riverhead Books:

Pointing to a case in which an author went to great lengths to lie, the imprint cited a "great deal of evidence" that Seltzer provided to support her story, including photos, letters and even supposed family members. (Seltzer introduced her agent to people that claimed to be her foster siblings). The imprint added, in the statement, that it "relies on authors to tell us the truth" and that authors promise as much by signing the contract.

That's nice, ladies and gentlemen -- but what happened to "trust, but verify"? God knows that publishers drop beaucoup bucks vetting the memoirs of celebrities; how about spending a few ducats to vet the memoirs of ordinary folk? As blogger Ira Socol points out:

The very fact, for example, that the intersection Ms. Seltzer says she wrote much of her memoir at does not exist (see Google Maps) would have - to a prudent, educated reporter willing to invest 30 seconds - raised the first of many red flags.

Well...yeah.

• Regarding The New York Times' culpability in this whole matter: Radar does a nice job laying out the internecine connections between the liar's editor and Times editors and contributors (short version: the editor was connected). I'm more interested in the puff profile of the liar that appeared in the paper the week before, a profile that -- for some reason -- appeared in the Homes section of the paper instead of the Arts (why?).

In retrospect, the author, Mimi Read, seems overly credulous:

In 2000, while working at a Starbucks, Ms. Jones bought her four-bedroom house in the Whiteaker neighborhood, considered the ghetto of Eugene, she said....

A barista with a four-bedroom house? I gotta get me one of those Starbucks jobs.

The odd part was that this was the second time in two weeks that Mimi Read's work in the Times has provided a huh? moment. The first was her Feb. 22 profile of another memoirist, the food writer Kim Sunée, author of Trail of Crumbs, and it occasioned a couple of phone calls and an email from people I know over one particular passage:

Her appetite for experience, love and feasting remains strong. While in New Orleans, she stayed at the Windsor Court Hotel with a friend and spent inordinate amounts of time with him in its fancy Polo Club Lounge, fascinated as a bartender named Roger theatrically concocted Sazeracs....

She and her friend smuggled their Sazeracs into the men’s steam room. “Oh no, I’m sure there’s some medical warning that you’re not supposed to drink a Sazerac in a steam room,” she said, laughing. “I’ll never be allowed in that hotel again.”

In a hibernating mood, she and her friend did not spend much time in restaurants. Instead she cooked gnocchi in their room, using lump crab meat, crème fraîche and Meyer lemon zest.

Okay. I can believe the Sazeracs-in-the-sauna, but the rest of the anecdote smells fishy, and it's not the lump crabmeat in crème fraîche. I have no doubt that Sunée told Read that story, but did neither she nor anyone at the Times wonder: How in the hell does one cook gnocchi in a hotel room? In the coffee maker?

Hotel-room gnocchi?* Starbucks baristas buying 4-bedroom houses? Read meets more interesting interview subjects than I do.

• A small minority of commenters at the Times website and around the Web are taking the position that if, hey, it's a good story, who cares if it's true?

Uh-huh. I think the reaction would be a bit diff if a woman wrote a harrowing memoir of surviving breast cancer or rape...and it was then found that the "woman" was actually some guy with a pseudonym and a six-figure advance.

Throw in the justifiable anger among many black folks that a white girl and a mainstream publisher teamed up to peddle ghetto-porn violence to a mostly white audience, juicing it up with plenty of gangbanging and "Big Mom's" shoebox full of secret cornbread recipes, and you're going to get a bunch of pissed-off people.

• As for the person who commented that the liar sold her lies "for only $100,000" -- can you hear the collective membership of the National Writers Union laughing and groaning in unison?

* Edited to add: The excellent Bev Marshall points out that she stayed in a suite at the Windsor Court that had a full kitchen. Whoops. Bad on me for assuming that the WC was so posh that they'd just whip up whatever you wanted; when I stayed there in an obviously lesser room, it was plenty swell but all I had a coffeemaker.

Comments

[Bev Marshall]

Well, I'm on fire with anger over all of this, but I do have to tell you this. The Windsor Court does have kitchens in their suites. We stayed there for an anniversary weekend and they had a full kitchen behind the louvered doors. Very discreet, of course. bev