Kevin Allman

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.

New York Times on Margaret Jones: "Live and learn"

According to Gawker, Craig R. Whitney, The New York Times' "standards editor," sent out a staff memo this morning in direct reaction to the Times' now-thoroughly-discredited puffball profile of Margaret Jones/Peggy Seltzer:

To the newsroom staff:

Single-source profiles of people who are not already well known quantities are traps we have fallen into twice in the past year or two, and that's too often. Until publishers start fact-checking their own nonfiction books, and that'll be the day, we should remember that profiles of unknown authors should always include reporting from other sources -- not just surrogates of the profilee like agents, publishers, lawyers, etc. -- to verifiy the most important facts. But even when there's no book involved, the same rule applies. If we can't find ways to check key facts, names, graduation claims, etc., we should hold the story until we can verify them, and if we can't, we should be suspicious. Live and learn....

Craig

The most powerful paper in the world gets thoroughly schnookered by a mendacious writer, and the "standards editor" responds with a Gallic-shrug memorandum? Live and learn.

Tonight's update on this week's latest fake-memoir controversy

The New York Times is still ferreting out the rat's nest of lies in the Margaret Jones fiasco, and Motoko Rich is running with the ball. Tonight she reports on the fake memoirist's (apparently) fake foundation:

The author who confessed this week to making up her memoir, Love and Consequences, about growing up as a foster child in gang-ridden South-Central Los Angeles, appears also to have made up a foundation that she claimed was helping “to reduce gang violence and mentor urban teens.”

Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones, referred to the International Brother/SisterHood in the author biography that appeared on the back flap of the book...With help from her agent, Faye Bender, Ms. Seltzer also set up a Web site, brothersisterhood.com, in October to describe the foundation and promote her book. Since the revelations about the book, however, Ms. Bender has taken down the Web site.

No record of the foundation could be found with the Internal Revenue Service or the states of Oregon, where Ms. Seltzer lives, or California.

I saw the site last night before it was taken down; it had very little information beyond contact info. No string of accomplishments, no financials. And Motoko Rich finds a real non-shocker:

Leaders of several other groups combating gang violence in Los Angeles who were listed on Ms. Seltzer’s Web site said they did not know of the International Brother/SisterHood or of Ms. Seltzer or Margaret B. Jones.

“I’ve never heard of her before in my life,” said Malik Spellman, an intervention prevention specialist at Unity T.W.O., which works to provide social services and stop gang activity in many South-Central Los Angeles neighborhoods and was listed on Ms. Seltzer’s site. “I believe if she was active, I would probably know her by name or the organization.”

Meanwhile, in what seems more and more a misguided attempt to deflect further facial omelettes, the Times still seems unwilling to cop to the relationship between Jones/Seltzer's editor and the former editor of the paper's book section.

Three news cycles and still not a word? Imagine the tack the Times would take with a White House obfuscation of that magnitude.

Last, I want to share an email from someone who, like me, finds the Times' defense -- and that of Mimi Read, their freelancer who Vanity-Faired the puffball profile on the liar with minimal checking -- to be disingenuous at best:

Mimi's defense is that she just has to trust people? Seriously?....

And here's the kicker. If Mimi had displayed one ounce of skepticism, if her editors had been suspicious and required follow-up, then Mimi and the New York Times would have broken this story. Instead of having egg on their faces, they'd be heroes. And you know what, that story would have been so much more compelling and interesting than the fluff features they ran on her Target furniture.

My correspondent has, as we say in New Orleans, a pernt.

Colin McEnroe asks the Times to do some 'splainin'

The Hartford Courant's Colin McEnroe is now asking The New York Times to sic its ombudsman (in Timesspeak: public editor) Clark Hoyt on the relationship between Sarah McGrath, editor of Love and Consequences, and Charles "Chip" McGrath, former editor of the Times' book section....

Seltzer's book got the kind of ride from the Times that authors dream of. A rave in a featured daily review by alpha critic Michiko Kakutani and then a truly gushy piece in the House and Home section. How did it get that kind of star-making treatment?

One has to think it has something to do with Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, who worked for three years on this book without ever noticing that it was 100 percent hooey and who is the daughter of Times writer-at-large Charles McGrath. In identifying papa this way, the Times kind of covers up who he really is -- the editor emeritus of the Times Book Review.

So, Mr. Hoyt, one thing I would like you to look into is how many times Mr. McGrath slouched into this or that office around the building and suggested that a little more than usual could be done for this book by one of Sarah's authors.  "Never" would be a wonderful answer.

I can't imagine McGrath père would actually flex his deltoids that inelegantly; that's not the way publishing, or book sections, tend to work. But The New York Times is doing itself no favors by not disclosing that family connection in its coverage of the case.

It's a fair question for a newspaper ombudsman, and I suppose McEnroe is a lot safer asking it of Mr. Hoyt instead of the paper's first embed-ombud, Dan "Deign of Terror" Okrent. But the story's not going away, so maybe Motoko Rich will address it in the next news cycle.

The best quote so far on l'affaire Margaret Jones

From the New York Daily News:

"One cannot protect oneself 100% from a dedicated hoaxster any more than one can protect oneself 100% from a dedicated terrorist," said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.

It's 3 a.m.

Your editors are safe and asleep.

But there's a phone at the publisher's office...and it's ringing....

The New York Times comes (sorta) clean on l'affaire Margaret Jones

Fascinatinger and fascinatinger. Motoko Rich updates her story from yesterday as to how Peggy Seltzer, Valley Girl, became Margaret Jones, L.A. gangbanger and recipient of a six-figure advance for her memoirs. The bullet points:

Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that released the book, by Margaret Seltzer, under a pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that he or Sarah McGrath, the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author from lying....

Ms. Seltzer told her editor and her publisher that she wanted to use the pseudonym because it was the name she was known by in the gang world and because she was trying to reconnect with her birth mother and felt that using her real name would complicate this effort. But she lied to them and in the book about most of the basic elements of her identity, claiming that she was part American Indian and that she had moved from foster home to foster home as a child. In fact, as she admitted on Monday, she grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, and graduated from a private Episcopal day school.

Ms. McGrath, who never met Ms. Seltzer during three years spent editing the book, said Ms. Seltzer, who lives in Eugene, Ore., had provided what she said were photographs of her foster siblings, a letter from a gang leader corroborating her story and had introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a person who claimed to be a foster sister.

Ms. McGrath said she also trusted Ms. Seltzer because she had come through “a respected literary agent” who had in turn been referred to the author by a writer whom Ms. Bender had worked with previously.

Despite editing the book in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding James Frey, author of a best-selling memoir, A Million Little Pieces, who admitted making up or exaggerating details in his account of drug addiction and recovery, Ms. McGrath said she did not independently check parts of Ms. Seltzer’s story or perform any kind of background check. She said she relied on Ms. Seltzer to tell the truth.

Mimi Read, the Times freelancer who produced a glowing, entirely credulous profile of Seltzer, also has some 'splainin' to do, and 'splainin' she does. She checked a few facts, but:

Ms. Read said she wished she had been more skeptical and done further fact-checking. “Of course I wish I could do it differently,” she said. “I think a lot of other people were fooled before me.”

Tom de Kay, editor of the House & Home section, said he asked Ms. Read to track down other people from Ms. Seltzer’s past to corroborate her story. Because Ms. Seltzer told Ms. Read that her foster siblings were dead, in prison or no longer in touch, it was difficult for Ms. Read to find people to interview.

One thing not 'splained in The New York Times is the fact that Sarah McGrath is the daughter of Charles "Chip" McGrath, the former editor of the New York Times Book Review. (New York magazine goes into it here.) But that's less damning than some would make it out to be; there are about three degrees of separation between anyone in the New York publishing world, and Jones and her book were profiled and reviewed in other heavy-duty media outlets. It would've been a surprise had the Times not given it big play.

Still, in terms of full disclosure and coming completely clean -- would a mention of the McGrath connection hurt?

Looks that way.

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.

Update on this week's latest fake-memoir controversy

Margaret Jones/Seltzer, the publishing world's latest little liar, is getting a lot of ink this morning...

• The Los Angeles Times has a story that includes an interview with the liar's mother:

"I think she got caught up in the facts of the story she was trying to write," Gay Seltzer said. "She's always been an activist and she tried to draw on the immediacy of the situation and became caught up in the persona of the narrator. She's very sorry and very upset."

Whatever that means...

• The Oregonian takes a local tack with a just-the-facts wrapup titled "Eugene woman fooled New York Times and publisher"....

• The Eugene Register-Guard reveals that it spiked a profile of the liar last week when the paper discovered she lied about her degree, adding helpfully (if awkwardly), "During her interview with The Register-Guard, Seltzer spoke in the same street-style dialect she uses in the book."

Word!

• The Portland Mercury's arts editor has her own unique take on the situation:

Oh, this again? I don’t happen to give a shit if memoirs are “true” or not....

• And Undercover Black Man nails it, just nails it:

It’s the story of how young Margaret used to run with the Bloods – along with her foster brothers – and sell drugs... until she turned her life around and left the gang-banging behind.

Guess what?

Fucking lies. All of it.

Her real name is Margaret “Peggy” Seltzer. She’s white. Just plain ol’ white. And she grew up comfortable in white-ass Sherman Oaks with her natural family....

Wanna know what’s worse? In a confessional phone interview yesterday with a New York Times reporter, this lying bitch had the nerve to say that she did it to help black people... like the ones she met while working in a gang-prevention program. Margaret Seltzer says black folks wanted her to write this book!

“I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk,” she said. “Maybe it’s an ego thing – I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

Sick lying bitch.

The Penguin Group, which published “Love and Consequences,” has recalled all copies of the book.

That’s not enough.

For starters, Seltzer’s ignorant, tone-deaf editor – Sarah McGrath – owes an apology to the black community of South Los Angeles.

UBM doesn't ask the question, but I will: Were any actual black people involved in the publication of this book?