The Latest Fake Memoir Continues to Undermine Authorial Authority in an Age When America Has Already Lost What Little Was Left of Its Innocence after That Game Show Scandal in the 1750s...

Nick Gillespie | March 5, 2008

The author of the best-selling auto-bio Love and Consequences goes to the back of the long line of literary fakers:

Margaret (Peggy) Seltzer of Eugene, Ore., who wrote under the name Margaret B. Jones, acknowledges that her critically acclaimed account of being raised in a black foster home in South-Central Los Angeles and following her black foster brothers into the gang life was a fabrication.

More here.

It's not immediately clear if this helps or hurts the manuscript I'm shopping around about having been raised in a Skinner Box by two ping-pong playing pigeons while becoming the first valedictorian at Hamburger University and then playing table tennis in death matches for money in Micronesia until a guy named Morrie started bullshitting me on Tuesdays. I hope not, for my reader's sakes.

Whatever the case, I salute the author for entertaining thousands of readers and look forward eagerly to her next book.

reason on literature's paper lions here.