Another Memoir is Exposed as a Lie
[Guest post by Jack Dunphy]
In “Love and Consequences” author Margaret B. Jones wrote of her experiences growing up in foster care in South-Central Los Angeles. She joined a gang and ran drugs, she even received a revolver for her 13th birthday. The book received great reviews in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and elsewhere. Jones was scheduled to begin a book tour next week.
She is now free to make other plans.
She made it all up. Jones never lived in South-Central, never sold drugs, never belonged to a gang. The revelation comes a week after another celebrated memoir, “Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years” by Misha Defonseca, was also revealed as a fraud.
The first chapter of Jones’s book is available on the New York Times website, and it’s clear from reading it that the book was never vetted by anyone with a knowledge of gangs in Los Angeles. In the fourth paragraph, Jones describes an “Original Gangster” named Kraziak, who drives a “candy-red 1969 Chevy Chevelle Malibu Super Sport with two black racing stripes up the middle and a red flag (bandana) neatly folded and tied around the rearview mirror.”
One might see a gangster flying his colors like that at a gang funeral or some other setting where he is surrounded by and protected by friends, but no one, least of all someone as savvy as this Kraziak is portrayed as being, would dare drive around South-Central L.A. with his Blood rag tied to his mirror unless he had a death wish.
It’s a sad story. Jones clearly has talent as a writer, and had she submitted the book as a novel she might now be on her way to fame rather than infamy. It was her own sister who tipped off the publisher, raising the question of how she thought she would ever get away with it.
I wonder if this is racism from the left. They have this image of “non-whites”that they hold dear.
Lyta79 (dc6e31) — 3/3/2008 @ 11:27 pmFakes like these cater to their fantasies, they get to feel better wbout themselves and yet still be just as ugly as the KKK. Asa Carter and “Little Tree”, Scott Thomas and TNR, etc. etc.
ROTFLMAO as one might say. The “paper of record” gulled again. They’re the journalistic gang that can’t shoot straight, but they demand solemn reverence and respect from the masses.
I’ll admit it’s an entertaining tale–the writer was supposedly half white, half Native American, raped by her father at age 5 or so, then brought up in a foster home. That’s playing straight to the center of the liberal obsessive sympathy for the down trodden. I even like the name “Margaret B. Jones” as in “be” Jones.
But for the moment, I’ll simply cherish the image of the Gray Lady–with egg all over her face.
Mike Myers (31af82) — 3/4/2008 @ 8:14 amBeing white and having spent years in a verifiable “hood”, I can say that if you want to survive, you don’t run with criminals. You accord them respect, and you don’t criticize their choices. If you do run with criminals, you are going to be a target for cops, other criminals etc. etc., and you stand out like a sore thumb. You just do your thing and be cool, and you adopt the “hard” ethos of the hood. The idea of some white chick running around with gang-bangers is absurd on its face.
Law (62ca0c) — 3/4/2008 @ 8:57 amUh…”The Audacity of Hope,” anyone?
L.N. Smithee (e1f2bf) — 3/4/2008 @ 9:26 amI’m wondering if this book was published by the Los Angeles Times because I’ve heard they sometimes print things that are also, uh, less than true….
Dana (b4a26c) — 3/4/2008 @ 11:04 amMs. Jones has been awarded the coveted Rosie Ruiz Trophy. Her acceptance speech will be written by Joe Biden and delivered by Milli Vanilli.
Steverino (e00589) — 3/4/2008 @ 2:00 pmI didn’t know all this stuff about Asa Carter, but I love The Education of Little Tree, and I think I always will. It’s a great story.
Leviticus (56bc5c) — 3/4/2008 @ 2:13 pmMy mom read it to me when I was a kid, and I’ve read it several times since.
Leviticus (56bc5c) — 3/4/2008 @ 2:14 pmI can’t imagine any OG driving around in a Chevelle Malibu, nevermind the idiocy about the rag.
MOG (f57a20) — 3/4/2008 @ 5:01 pmMOG wrote: I can’t imagine any OG driving around in a Chevelle Malibu, nevermind the idiocy about the rag.
I can imagine it. Back then, the Malibu was, as they used to say, “sporty.”
L.N. Smithee (b048eb) — 3/4/2008 @ 5:10 pmHad a ’70 Malibu, straight stock, 3-speed on the column, that I bought in ’79 that was used as an “oilfield” car here in South Louisiana…bondo, cheap paint, new clutch plate, and I used it for two years…a friend used it for two more as he finished college…sold it to another friend for $300 who used it for two more years to finish college, then in turn sold it to a refinisher who needed the parts….might have been the best car I ever had…I’ll buy the blue ’70 from Smithee’s link….
reff (59b2ad) — 3/4/2008 @ 7:47 pmIts getting so you cant believe a thing from these lie a day liberal left-wing journalists
krazy kagu (c6ad08) — 3/4/2008 @ 9:12 pmRead the writing on the wall; She slept with, and did drugs with, numerous black men throughout her life and concluded that she was an authority on the phenomenon of institutional racism. A professional victim writ large in her own mind.
Kevin Fitzroy (4bed8c) — 3/4/2008 @ 9:39 pmFrom Tim Rutten in today’s LATs:
“Publishers are only too glad to serve that appetite (for tell-all memoirs of every savage and degrading form of abuse), but they do so at a time when their own economics make them particularly vulnerable to fraud. No nonfiction publisher can afford serious fact-checking anymore; most do none at all. At the same time, they know that the TV and radio promotion critical to creating bestsellers demands authors “with a story to tell.” How many talk shows would have booked Seltzer/Jones if she had forthrightly admitted she was a white writer of imaginative fiction with a social conscience that impelled her to write about gang life in South Los Angeles?”
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-rutten5mar05,0,4708333.column
Dana (b4a26c) — 3/5/2008 @ 9:36 amThere are so many truly worthy books that never
William D. McCann (56a0a8) — 3/10/2008 @ 3:48 pmsee the light of day. The personality cult which
seems to have subsumed great literature is in full
sway.
William D. McCann