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, 9:19am
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.
daniel k | March 5, 2008, 12:29pm | #
Eric Idle: I was happier then and I had nothing! We used to live in this tiny old tumbled-down house with great big holes in
the roof.
Graham Chapman: House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twentysix of us, no furniture,
half the floor was missing, we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
Terry Jones: You were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in the corridor!
Michael Palin: Oh, we used to dream of living in a corridor! Would have been a palace to us! We used to live in an old
watertank on a rubbish tip. We'd all woke up every morning by having a load of rotten fish dumped all over us! House, huh!
Eric Idle: Well, when I say a house, it was just a hole in the ground, covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us!
Graham Chapman: We were evicted from our hole in the ground. We had to go and live in a lake!
Terry Jones: You were lucky to have a lake! There were 150 of us living in a shoebox in the middle of the road!
Michael Palin: A cardboard box?
Terry Jones: Aye!
Michael Palin: You were lucky! We lived for three months in a rolled-up newspaper in a septic tank! We used to have to go
up every morning, at six o'clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week in, week out,
for six pence a week, and when we got home, our dad would slash us to sleep with his belt!
Graham Chapman: Luxury! We used to have to get up out of the lake at three o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a
handful of hot grubble, work twenty hours a day at mill, for two pence a month, come home, and dad would beat us around
the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
Terry Jones: Well, of course, we had it tough! We used to have to get up out of the shoebox in the middle of the night, and
lick the road clean with our tongues! We had to eat half a handful of freezing cold grubble, work twenty-four hours a day at
mill for four pence every six years, and when we got home, our dad would slice us in two with a breadknife!
Eric Idle: Right! I had to get up in the morning, at ten o'clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, eat a lump of cold
poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill and pay millowner for permission to come to work, and when we got home,
our dad would kill us and dance about on our graves, singing Hallelujah!
Michael Palin: Aah. Are you trying to tell the young people of today that, and they won't believe you!
All: No, no they won't!
