White gang-banger memoir: [barnyard expletive]

I knew it! I just knew it! When I read this gushy New York Times feature about the white girl who grew up in South Central L.A. with a black family, and who grew up as a gang-banger, then wrote "Love and Consequences," a heart-wrenching memoir about it after going to college -- well, I figured we were back in J.T. Leroy territory. That is to say, it was going to prove a fabrication. The story was way too perfectly literary. But even now, given Jayson Blair, and given how hard everybody in the NY literary circles fell for the J.T. Leroy hoax because it sounded so good, and the James Frey scandal -- well, I thought surely the Times can't have been taken in again. Surely.

Sure enough, it's all lies! Excerpt:

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

So this lying thief expects people to feel sorry for her because she meant well?!

How is it that a publishing house spends three years working with an author on a story that defies credulity, and doesn't once check up on her veracity? How is it that a journalist for The New York Times -- which ain't the Bugtussle Daily Bugle -- buys it hook, line and sinker? How hard would it have been for reporter Mimi Read to have asked the author, Margaret Seltzer (her real name), for numbers and contact info for family members she wrote about in the book? That's Personality Profile 101, very basic J-school stuff. They don't do that anymore at the Times? Somebody's got a lot of explaining to do.

The author was ratted out by her sister, who read the Times profile and phoned the publisher to say it was all a hoax:

In a telephone interview, Ms. Seltzer’s sister, Ms. Hoffman, 47, said: “It could have and should have been stopped before now.” Referring to the publisher, she added: “I don’t know how they do business, but I would think that protocol would have them doing fact-checking.”

Yeah, you would think. But see, that's not how publishing is done in the big city.

(Here's the first chapter of "Love and Consequences," if you're interested).

UPDATE: Ross, broadly sympathetic to the point made here, nevertheless points out that there are so many books issued by any given publisher a year that rigorous fact-checking is impossible. Agreed. But -- and he doesn't seem to disagree with me here -- spending three years dealing with the author of an autobiography that is by any stretch of the imagination an extremely unlikely story, shouldn't you, you know, make some effort to verify that your author is not a b.s. artist? After James Frey's "Million Little Pieces," wouldn't you do that simply as a matter of professional due diligence?