Sepideh Saremi

Seriously, how anyone believed for ONE SECOND that Margaret B. Jones (aka Seltzer) had a legit memoir is really beyond me. The basic plot smacks of total fakery: little white girl grows up in South Central foster homes, runs drugs for her black, gang member foster brothers… wasn’t that a Lifetime movie? From the early ’90s? Maybe now it will be. The sad-hilarious thing is that her own sister called her out on it. And now her writing career is over before it started. I can understand the motivation to tell the lie. But how did she think she could get away with this?

I don’t know why I am even having a reaction, except maybe I feel like the publishing world is set up for - and LOVES - these stupid, drug-infested “true” stories about white people (see also: James Frey, A Million Little Pieces). Do you know why? I don’t.

But maybe it’s because the publishing world is 90% white, upper-middle-class Americans that have white, upper-middle-class guilt. They grow up with labradors and backyards and violin lessons. Maybe their parents get divorced, but it’s never because the dad beats the mom, but rather because they “just don’t love each other anymore.” And the white main characters in these memoirs are a nice conduit for the white-dominated publishing world to explore a dark life that would have led to literary-writer genius, which seems way more exciting than literary-editor genius. It helps them feel like they did more (less) than go to Swarthmore and graduate magna cum laude with a degree in 20th century poetics. But they never learn that it’s easier to get a fake story from a white person who had the benefit of decent schooling and zero disenfranchisement than to get a real story from someone who actually lived that dark life and was too busy living it to take a freaking creative writing class. Just generalizin’.

But here is what Seltzer says that really gets me:

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “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. 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.”

Ugh. Gross. If you want to give people a voice, edit an anthology by people who lived real lives, dude. It figures that the whole thing came from a woman who grew up in Sherman Oaks, by far the ponciest city in the Valley, where nothing ever happens. And it’s telling that city’s most notable denizen is actually the king of artifice, Liberace.