Tayari's Blog: There's A Sucker Born Every Minute

Posted by Tayari Jones on March 3, 2008 10:57 PM 



And apparently, they all go to work in publishing.

This has been a bad week for liars. First the holocaust survivor who said she was literally
raised by wolves turns out to be just a regular, if depressed, person. Now, Margaret
Seltzer, the author of Love and
Consequences , the highly acclaimed "memoir" about her life as a half Native American/half
White gang banger, has been been explosed as a fraud.

In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers,
Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her
experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first
gun as a birthday present when she was 14. Ms. Seltzer told The Times last week, “One of the
first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot.”

It's like a satire of a satire. This is my favorite line in the whole NYT article: "Sarah
McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said
she was stunned to discover that the author had lied." Gotta love that understatement and comic
timing.

But seriously, you may remember an article last summer that appered in TimeOut New York
about matters of race in publishing. (My post on the subject here .) This
was one of most important quotes from the article: “Invariably,” says Craig, “a
black-themed book will come up for consideration, and there won’t be anyone of color to put in
an opinion, or there’ll be one, who shouldn’t bear the burden alone. So we all pretend we’re
experts. Maybe I’m the only one who’s embarrassed by that.” The end result of such
roundtables, one can only fear, could be that the only books depicting people of color that
get published are those that do not challenge white assumptions.


I can't help but wonder if Ms. Seltzer's book with all it's far-fetched,
tales-from-the-urban-jungle flair, would have passed the smell test were it read by a more
diverse panel of editors. 







Comment #1, by carleen 
I read that article in the Times and IMMEDIATELY thought it was going to be a hoax. But then
I thought, surely after all the others, she had been vetted to heaven and back. Ha! Guess I'm
a sucker too.
March 3, 2008 11:20 PM



Comment #2, by Michael Fischer 
Um, wow. That is ridiculous.
March 3, 2008 11:43 PM



Comment #3, by Sarah Schulman
I wonder why they didn't present their books as novels.
March 4, 2008 01:39 PM



Comment #4, by Sarah Schulman 
I wonder why they didn't present their books as novels.
March 4, 2008 01:41 PM