When author Margaret Seltzer purposely lies in her memoir Love and Consequences, whose fault is it? Seltzer’s? Her publisher’s? The media that publicized these lies? Why would Seltzer admit that she lied about her past, claiming that she was a “half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods,” when in fact, she “is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family?” Read about this controversy in the two New York Times articles below.
“In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked for or found,” Mr. Kloske said. “The fact is that the author went to extraordinary lengths: she provided people who acted as her foster siblings. There was a professor who vouched for her work, and a writer who had written about her that seemed to corroborate her story.” He added that Ms. Seltzer had signed a contract in which she had legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” Mr. Kloske said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”
“Gang Memoir, Turning Page, Is Pure Fiction,” by Mokoto Rich (The New York Times).
“Tracking the Fallout of (Another) Literary Fraud,” by Mokoto Rich (The New York Times).
