Riverhead Books has recalled all copies of "Love and Consequences", a young woman's memoir of gang life and survival on the streets of Los Angeles, California. The book was published last week.
Just how TRUE are those memoirs sitting on local bookstore shelves? In light of last week’s scandal involving
Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca and the fabrication of content made public over Oprah’s book club selection entitled
A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, a new “story” of sorts is being pulled from publication.
Love and Consequences, a true story of a young woman’s survival of gang life on the streets of Los Angeles, California has turned out to be a total fabrication of events. Consequently, publishers have recalled all copies of the book and are offering refunds.
A
recent report tells of Margaret Seltzer’s, or more commonly known as memoir author Margaret B. Jones, intent to defraud readers by knowingly taking information from real gang members and writing and selling them as her own.
In her book, Seltzer talks about how she, as “Margaret Jones”, was raised, as a white girl, by a black foster family in a poverty-stricken gang neighborhood of South Los Angeles. Her stories of survival through illegal activities in support of the violent gang known as the Bloods, as well as witnessing the murder of her own foster brother by rival gang, the Crips, was all just fictional writing.
In reality, her biological family raised Margaret Seltzer, a 33-year-old Oregon resident, in a wealthy San Fernando Valley, California area, where she attended a private religious school.
Seltzer wrote her faux-memoirs while performing outreach work to gang members in the Los Angeles area.
The million-dollar question: How did her little lie come to be known?
It wasn’t a burning sense of remorse on Margaret’s part that brought her secret to light. Her sister, Cyndi Hoffman, stumbled upon an article in the
New York Times about the author of the memoirs and contacted the publisher, questioning their fact-checking methods on the content of the author's story: her younger sister.
Call it fate; call it destiny; call it meant to be. The book is being recalled, as this woman deceived a lot of readers with fabrications, lies and by stealing the stories of real victims. She abused the system for her own perception of glory. In her defense, Margaret Seltzer states:
……I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don't listen to,”……
Who will be listening now, Margaret Seltzer? Who will be listening now?
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