I can’t believe I am writing again about fake memoirs and fantasy nonfiction. Believe me, I’d rather not be.

I’d rather be writing about the awakening of the book publishing industry to the process – long employed by magazines – of fact-checking.  I’d rather be writing about how top editor Nan Talese led the charge after her public humiliation over James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces.

“We won’t get fooled again!” Talese shouted, or I’d like to write that she shouted, like a female Pete Townshend.  (Now there’s an image.)  I’d like to report that after the Oprah- and The New York Times-fueled brouhaha over Frey’s fabrications, Random House and Simon & Shuster and HarperCollins and Riverhead and all the other big guys thought long and hard about their editorial process.  The editors sat down around a table to discuss the difference between emotional truth and factual truth.  Someone said, “Emotional truth is what we expect from novelists.  But narrative nonfiction writers…well, we hold them to higher standards.  From them we also demand factual truth.”

Another editor nodded vigorously.  “Yes, yes,” she said.  “There is power and authenticity in the factual.  We must preserve that.  We can’t compromise that.”

Maybe someone tried to float the idea that fabrication is okay as long as it is in the service of emotional truth.

“No!” my favorite editor insisted.  “That’s a novel, not nonfiction.”

I’d like to tell the story of this lively meeting.  But I can’t.  It would be a fabrication.

The story I have to tell – I am forced to tell – is quite different.  This story happened because Nan T and her colleagues didn’t learn their lesson.  It happened because they did get fooled again.  It happened because yet another writer presented invention as fact, fantasy as reality, a novel as a memoir.  This author, Margaret B. Jones aka Peggy Seltzer, didn’t “just” fudge some facts or invent a few incidents (as James Frey did).  She created and claimed an entire life for herself, a life she never lived. 

In her “gritty” (Los Angeles Times) “heart-wrenching” (The New York Times) tale, she wrote about her life as a half-Native American kid growing up in a black foster family in South Central L.A. where she hung with the Crips and sold drugs on the corners.  Surrounded by foster brothers and sisters who were variously addicted, shot, incarcerated or committed suicide (or some combination thereof), part of a hard-luck, street-wise family ripped from the pages of a script for The Wire, overseen by the flawed, courageous, hard-working Big Mom, Margaret B. Jones found tenderness, friendship and love among the gangs, violence and drugs of her long and eventful childhood.

Powerful stuff. 

Quite a bit more powerful, interesting – and marketable – than the real tale of Margaret B. Jones (that is, Peggy Seltzer) a white girl who actually grew up in a two-parent, middle class suburban Sherman Oaks home from which she ventured, as a teen, to attend an exclusive private high school.

We know why she got away with – or almost got away with – peddling this story as fact:  The publishing industry doesn’t check facts.  Margaret’s editor at Riverhead, Sarah McGrath, was stunned by the disclosure, which she termed a "a huge personal betrayal.”

"It's very upsetting to us,” she told the The New York Times when the hoax was revealed, “because we spent so much time with this person and felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn't have any money or heat and we completely bought into that."  Her comments ran in a story a few days after the same newspaper had published both a glowing review of the book and a gushing, front-page Style section feature story.  A Times reporter had flown out to Oregon to do the interview.  Margaret B. had just done an interview on NPR and was preparing for the launch of her national book tour.  The Times reporter didn’t check the facts – and neither did her editor.  Deadline pressure, you know.  The Times reporter didn’t multi-source the story.  The characters in Margaret’s book, the ones who could corroborate her tale, were conveniently dead, in jail or disappeared.    

That’s the how – how the book and the attending publicity made it into the marketplace. But I am also interested with the why.  Why did Peggy do it?

At first I thought:  Just another advance-hungry writer looking for a sale, looking to use fact to lend gravitas to a story that could not make it otherwise.  After all, what publisher would go nuts over a novel about a life in the ‘hood penned by a middle-class white woman living in Eugene, Oregon?  A memoir on the other hand…the real deal, the nitty gritty.

Then I thought:  She’s just lazy.  She could have told this same story as a deeply, richly, carefully researched nonfiction narrative.  Adrian Nicole LeBlanc (a white girl) managed to do it beautifully and authentically in her award-winning book Random Family – not the same story, of course, but a story of connection and tenderness on the mean streets.  But Margaret/ Peggy didn’t do that.  She didn’t take the time.  She didn’t have the chops.

What she had, I think, was a deep need to be someone other than who she was, to deny her own privilege. Years before the book, as a student in an English class at the University of Oregon, she had written a term paper about growing up half-Native American on the rez. 

There are levels of betrayal here.  The author betrayed the trust of her agent, her editor, her publisher (her university professor, the The New York Times Style section reporter).  She almost got to betray the trust of her readers.  (Not quite: The book was pulled from the stores the day the hoax hit the newspapers.) 

But there are two other betrayals that run much deeper.  First, she betrayed her real family, the life she actually did live, the mother and father who actually raised her, created a safe home for her, fed and educated her.  By pretending to be someone else, she disrespected all they had done for her.  She disowned them.

And second, she betrayed the people whose stories she stole and claimed as her own, the foster kids of South Central, the foster mothers and grandmothers trying to keep families together, the mixed-race kids caught between cultures.  These people actually had to live the tough life Margaret B. got to exploit for college credit and later, a book contract. 

After she was found out, she said she had worked in the social welfare system in Los Angeles, that she cared about the kids and the families and the issues they faced, that her writing came out of this caring.  For me, it’s hard to see the care, buried as it is under the betrayal.  She said she had set up a nonprofit foundation to help kids in the ‘hood, that some of the money she would make from the book would go to the foundation.  Reporters, smelling blood after the hoax was revealed, hunted for but could find no evidence of a foundation.

LAUREN KESSLER’s award-winning book, Dancing with Rose: Finding Life in the Land of Alzheimer’s, will be available in paperback June 1.  She is the founder and editor of Etude.