(N)on Fiction

Part of the reason memoirs tend to be so compelling is that they're real. They can illustrate larger truths about the human condition, and the message will stick better, because you know that what you're reading happened to a real person, normal, average, just like you and me.

In "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed memoir published last week, Margaret B. Jones wrote about her life as 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.

The problem is that none of it is true.

Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who 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. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

NYT

Amazing how perception of an artistic work changes when you realize it's fiction, instead of non.