New Pages is looking for Literary Magazine Reviewers — so if you like to read them, feel inspired to talk about them, and (best of all) want to get them free, click here for more information from New Pages.
Congratulations to Tori Malcangio, whose story “Coveting Stucco” appears in the latest issue of ZYZZYVA, just now off the presses. If you can’t find a copy locally, visit the ZYZZYVA web site to order one.
Congrats, Tori!
This weekend I discovered FreeRice.com, which has proven itself to be yet another wonderful way to escape the blank page. It’s a fun little word game (rather like the SATs, only without the pressure) in which you guess the correct meaning of a word, and the program will adjust to make subsequent words harder or easier, depending on how you do. It’s good news all around: Free Rice will help you improve your vocabulary (if you’re ignoring your writing, you may as well be doing something that will enhance it) and, best of all, will donate rice through the UN World Food Program for every word you get right (okay, so there’s a little pressure). But you can play as long as you like, learning new words and helping combat world hunger. I’m hooked.
When the Los Angeles Times published my short story, “Aftershock,” in its Sunday magazine, it was fact checked. In fact, I was contacted because one of the story’s lines — “She’d never felt the earth shake until she moved to California, even though she’d grown up near the largest earthquake ever recorded, the one that sent the Mississippi flowing backward, that cracked chimneys in Washington, D.C., that made church bells ring in Boston–all from its epicenter in New Madrid” — was not technically accurate. The New Madrid earthquake is, in fact, ranked sixth or seventh on the list of most powerful quakes, and despite the folklore, there is no evidence that the Mississippi River actually flowed backward or that it cracked chimneys in D.C. (I hadn’t checked — this is supposed to be one of the benefits of writing fiction.)
But I was impressed. After all, this was a piece of fiction, and yet it had been checked for accuracy as if it were nonfiction. (We revised the line to read “one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded” and allowed that we could leave the rest alone, as it reflected the character’s perception of those events.) This sort of attention to detail shows a great deal of respect for the reader; it suggests that someone out there, even knowing he or she is reading fiction, might just be sharp enough to catch this inaccuracy. And the problem was resolved in two emails.
If only the New York Times, before publishing its feature on Margaret Jones, aka Peggy Seltzer, had asked fact checkers to send out a few emails, or make a few calls. Instead (see previous blog) the paper ended up publishing an embarrassing follow-up story about how she fabricated her entire memoir.
And now, with more and more memoirs being outed as fiction, it seems that publishers, too, might have to start adding fact checkers to their staffs.
In case you missed the feature “A Refugee from Gangland” in last week’s New York Times, about “a heart-wrenching memoir” written by “a single mother who spent her youth as a foster child and gang member” — well, not to worry. As it turns out — in yet another baffling case of memoir posing as fiction — that the entire book was fabricated, according to this update.
Last week, the Times called the memoir, Love and Consequences, “an intimate, visceral portrait of the gangland drug trade of Los Angeles as seen through the life of one household: a stern but loving black grandmother working two jobs; her two grandsons who quit school and became Bloods at ages 12 and 13; her two granddaughters, both born addicted to crack cocaine; and the author, a mixed-race white and Native American foster child who at age 8 came to live with them in their mostly black community.”
Now, the paper reports that Jones is all white and grew up in the San Fernando Valley with her biological family, where she went to private school. Her story is entirely false, down to the smallest details (her author bio states that she’s an alumna of the University of Oregon, yet she never graduated; her real name is Peggy Seltzer). And it was the original New York Times article that eventually outed her — the author’s sister, Cynthia Seltzer Hoffman, read the story and called the publisher, Riverhead, to tell them that the whole thing had been made up.
The author said she got the idea for her “memoir” after meeting people who were working to end gang violence and “thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to.” However, for some reason, she had always written about these experiences as her own, and when someone gave her pages to an agent, she continued the charade. Which begs the question: What’s so wrong with writing a novel?
When the James Frey controversy broke out, similar questions were tossed around — and among the answers are that memoir is a hotter genre these days, that people are more interested in true stories. The problem is, fewer and fewer of these memoirs appear to be true. So why bother? Dave Eggers, with his novel What Is the What, about a young refugee from southern Sudan, gave voice to the Lost Boys without attempting to pass off his book as something it’s not. It can be done, and done well.
It’s very amusing to read the first NYT article after learning the truth about this book. The author really got into her role, offering such quotes as “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot” and “The reason I wanted to write the book is that all the time, people would say to me, you’re not what I imagine someone from South L.A. would be like.” She also claims she’s still a gang member (”Once a Blood, always a Blood.”). With this sort of creativity and imagination, she really should be a novelist. But now, she’s not likely to have a promising career as a writer in any genre.