<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  A young woman in a too-tight white T-shirt squints into the camera. Behind her, palm trees and a ranch house roof cut through the Southern California haze. You can feel the heat bearing down on her as her extra large silver hoop earrings, circa Salt-N-Pepa 1992, glint and bounce against her shiny, shoulder-length brown hair. With the exception of a little lip gloss and cleavage that strains pneumatically against her crewneck, she is entirely ordinary. If you had to guess her story on looks alone, a disgruntled reality show coed bitching about her housemates would be a possibility. But listen to her speak, and a surprisingly different picture emerges. In perfectly pitched gangsta, she talks about her life as a member of the Bloods, the gang that reigned over her neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles.  &amp;quot;I grew up looking up to the money, looking up to the power,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s what I wanted.&amp;quot; If you grow up in the hood, she continues, gang life is the endgame. &amp;quot;People say, `Why would anybody join a gang?&amp;#039; It&amp;#039;s like being a Palestinian suicide bomber. When you&amp;#039;re born into it and you&amp;#039;re caught up in it...your ego and your pride...it makes perfect, perfect sense,&amp;quot; she says, pinching the word sense so it sounds like since. She details the particulars\u2014the gang&amp;#039;s military-style hierarchy, the killing of her brother and best friend\u2014with complete stoicism: &amp;quot;We used to say, `This isn&amp;#039;t America. It&amp;#039;s a whole &amp;#039;nother world. It&amp;#039;s the urban third world. And we&amp;#039;re just soldiers.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; But when she mentions the &amp;quot;cold game&amp;quot; that must be played, a practiced numbness to personal tragedy and loss, she seems to choke back tears just before the screen fades to black. It&amp;#039;s an intriguing story if you don&amp;#039;t know who she is, and an extraordinary performance if you do. The young woman is Margaret Seltzer, playing the part of Margaret B. Jones. The film is a 10-minute video that appears to promote Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, a book Seltzer wrote using Jones as a pen name. It was how she was known in the gang world, she claimed to her publisher, Riverhead Books. She also claimed that, as a former foster child, she was in the midst of repairing her relationship with her birth mother and didn&amp;#039;t want to disrupt the process by using her real name publicly. Love and Consequences is no simple fakery. It&amp;#039;s the handiwork of someone who gathered information about her subject with the rigor of an anthropologist, then soaked it up so totally that her presentation has no distance. It feels raw and real, almost uncomfortably so\u2014like a person talking to you from too close. The low-grade thrum of anxiety and fear of predation seep from the pages on contact. But what this virtuosic deception reveals about identity, cognition, and our appetite for the truth in a mediated age is in many ways more unsettling than the flinty depiction of gang life itself. Near the beginning of the book, Seltzer-as-Jones is in kindergarten. A teacher figures out that a family member is sexually abusing her. She&amp;#039;s promptly whisked from her middle-class life in suburban L.A. and shunted into foster care. After a string of unsuccessful &amp;quot;placements,&amp;quot; she ends up toting her few possessions in a trash bag\u2014&amp;quot;luggage for foster kids&amp;quot;\u2014to South Central to live with &amp;quot;Big Mom,&amp;quot; a saintly, God-fearing grandma engaged in a futile struggle to keep four of her grandchildren fed, clothed, and out of prison. In the book, Seltzer refers to herself as &amp;quot;Bree,&amp;quot; a nickname for her half-white, half\u2013Native American alter ego\u2014a total outsider in desperate need of acceptance. Quickly absorbing the customs of her new culture, she writes, she greases and braids her little &amp;quot;sisters&amp;#039; &amp;quot; kinky hair and mixes them Kool- Aid, stretching a single pouch for days by adding sugar. She carefully catalogs the slang spoken by Terrell and Taye, her new &amp;quot;brothers,&amp;quot; and repeats their words to herself, &amp;quot;committing their meaning and pronunciation to memory&amp;quot; like a badass Eliza Doolittle.  She also learns to toughen up. Taye won&amp;#039;t let her out of the bathroom until she finally yells, &amp;quot;Punk-ass nigga!&amp;quot; and pushes him in the stomach with feeling. A kindly ex-con neighbor gives her a pit bull puppy (the totem dog of the Bloods) and a copy of Manchild in the Promised Land, Claude Brown&amp;#039;s classic about coming of age amid drugs and poverty in 1940s Harlem. After Terell and then Taye become gang initiates at ages 13 and 11, Bree starts making drug deliveries for &amp;quot;big homies.&amp;quot; She even cooks up her own crack in order to pay the electric bill. The moment is a big deal\u2014the poignant beat in a screenplay where the hero officially crosses over to the dark side. Instead of letting loose the violins and drawing Bree with eyes afire as she stirs her smoking cauldron to underscore the inevitability of her own descent, Seltzer lays out the details matter-of-factly, like she&amp;#039;s Rachael Ray making a pesto sauce: &amp;quot;I turned the front burner off and placed the jar into the bowl of ice water; then, while I waited for my product to cool, I grabbed the plastic wrap, a lighter, and a pair of pliers so I could wrap the rocks up securely and carry them in my mouth.&amp;quot;  Her straightforward tone is what gives the work its breath-sapping weight and, oddly, what makes it feel truthful. It&amp;#039;s also what keeps Love from veering off into a send-up of gang culture\u2014Nike sneakers, crack pipes, and all. While she&amp;#039;s working on her &amp;quot;product,&amp;quot; the dramatic tension comes not from whether this white girl can get the job done, but from the fact that if it takes her too long\u2014which it does\u2014she&amp;#039;s going to miss a math test, and face summer school and perhaps a new foster placement. Even on the front lines, the mundane prevails. &amp;quot;At least in a few hours I&amp;#039;d be coming home,&amp;quot; she writes, &amp;quot;bill paid, a little extra money in my pocket, and able to jump in the shower.&amp;quot; When Love was published in late February, it was met with overwhelming fanfare. Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, not known for effusive praise, thought it &amp;quot;humane and deeply affecting.&amp;quot; O: The Oprah Magazine called it &amp;quot;startlingly tender.&amp;quot; Kirkus, the bible of booksellers, praised its &amp;quot;hardened voice of experience.&amp;quot; It had all the ingredients of a best-seller, or at the very least, a critical hit: Through Jones\u2014articulate but authentically thuggish, a marketing department&amp;#039;s dream\u2014 white middle-class America could peer safely into the curious, gritty reality that exists just over the freeway. Riverhead planned a public relations blitz. A book tour would begin in Eugene, Oregon, where Seltzer, then 33, lived with her eight-year-old daughter, Rya. A few days before, she warmed up with some public radio interviews and hosted a reporter for the House &amp;amp;amp; Home section of the Times, which described her new, bullet-free life in Eugene. She had a garden and cooked black-eyed peas with pork neck bones just as Big Mom had taught her. A &amp;quot;friend&amp;quot; from L.A. was visiting while he convalesced from a gunshot wound to the leg. &amp;quot;One of the beautiful things about [writing] a book,&amp;quot; she said, &amp;quot;is you get to put in all the little things that touch people. If you can find a way to combine ordinary moments like being at a birthday party or making dinner with the kind of violent things that people can&amp;#039;t even wrap their brains around, then people can relate.&amp;quot; On March 4, just days after the book hit stores, the Times published another piece on Seltzer, this time a shocking announcement that Love and Consequences was entirely made up. Seltzer admitted to a different reporter in a &amp;quot;sometimes tearful, often contrite&amp;quot; conversation that she had grown up in the wealthy Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks, which is 82 percent white and home to the Galleria mall, birthplace of the Valley Girl. She went to high school at Campbell Hall, the alma mater of the Olsen twins. She is not part Native American. She was never placed in foster care nor did she have any foster siblings. She did, however, have a real brother; she also had a real sister, Cyndi Hoffman, 47. It was Hoffman who called up Riverhead after seeing the House &amp;amp;amp; Home profile and blew her cover. Sarah McGrath, the Riverhead editor who had been corresponding with Seltzer for three years but had never met her in person, was shocked. Riverhead had published the memoir that James Frey wrote just after the now-infamous A Million Little Pieces, which had turned him into the poster child for phony memoirists, and editors there knew to be especially strict about confirming facts. McGrath grilled Seltzer over the phone about the accuracy of Love, to the point where Seltzer complained about the insult, according to one of Seltzer&amp;#039;s friends. (McGrath and Riverhead declined to comment for this piece.) Seltzer&amp;#039;s agent, Faye Bender, was also blindsided by the con, as she&amp;#039;d known Seltzer the longest and had actually spent time with her. Seltzer allegedly had even given Bender a guided tour of South Central and introduced her to a young woman she&amp;#039;d said was her foster sister. When she told Bender about the &amp;quot;gang peace organization&amp;quot; she was trying to start, it was Bender who registered the address for her: Brothersisterhood.com. The revelation was also an embarrassment for the Times, which then published a series of pieces chronicling the fallout. The considerable lengths of her deception were eerily similar to that of Stephen Glass, the New Republic reporter who not only made up subjects but also created elaborate evidence to fortify his claims. Glass built websites, set up voicemail boxes, and even had his brother pretend to be an employee at a fake company. And like Glass, Seltzer produced actual people including professors and fellow writers who corroborated her stories, according to a Times interview with Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books. In a matter of days, Seltzer went from literary sensation to traitor. Riverhead acted quickly. They recalled all 19,000 copies of Love and offered a refund to those who had already managed to buy one. Seltzer, who had spent years, perhaps an entire decade, building this persona, made no further comment (nor did she respond to ELLE&amp;#039;s efforts to reach her). She was clearly in violation of her publishing contract. Perhaps she also withdrew when she saw how venomous the outrage had become. Seltzer was torn apart on the same blogs that had lionized her. &amp;quot;Another liberal liar getting her press,&amp;quot; read one post. &amp;quot;Burn the Witch!&amp;quot; said another.  Her sanity and her family dynamics were dissected and debated.  &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;d pay good money to see what happens the next time the Seltzer sisters are in the same room with each other. Can you imagine? Drama.&amp;quot; Naturally, Seltzer was lumped in with James Frey, as well as Misha Defonseca, whose memoir about fleeing the Nazis and living with wolves was exposed as a fraudjust a week before Seltzer&amp;#039;s untruths came to light. (Defonseca wasn&amp;#039;t even Jewish, never mind the wolves.) All memoirists suddenly seemed suspect\u2014Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling A Long Way Gone, about his years as a child soldier in Sierra Leone, had been questioned by an Australian newspaper for significant chronological discrepancies. Beah denied the charges but couldn&amp;#039;t dispel the paper&amp;#039;s doubts. Running With Scissors author Augusten Burroughs was about to release his fifth memoir, giving his critics yet another chance to attack the veracity of his writing and mental recall, and even satirist-memoirist darling David Sedaris was goosed in The New Republic for his too-hilarious-to-be-true embellishments. But what Seltzer did wasn&amp;#039;t the same. She hadn&amp;#039;t merely exaggerated her background to make it more dramatic. She&amp;#039;d created an entirely new history for herself and carried it into the present. She wasn&amp;#039;t just writing an alternative reality. She was living it. Seltzer&amp;#039;s friends believed her to be a young woman who was sexually abused by a relative, put in foster care, and raised in South Central, where she subsequently joined the Bloods. &amp;quot;Every tiny detail of that life, she stood by it,&amp;quot; says Inga Muscio, a feminist writer who considered herself a close friend of Seltzer&amp;#039;s and stayed at her house in Eugene on multiple occasions. &amp;quot;There was never any wavering\u2014the book is true,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;Her life is a lie.&amp;quot; If you watch the video, paying attention to the asides, not the flashier details of urban warfare, Seltzer-as-Jones seems to speak in double meanings. &amp;quot;I live in two worlds, you know,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I live in a small town. I walk around and I know that nobody there can possibly understand what I&amp;#039;m about, where I come from. I can tell stories. We were wilding. I mean, we had fun. I could tell you stories you would crack up. I could tell you stories where you would cry, too, and it would stick with you forever.&amp;quot; But playing fast and loose with her own truth was only part of the controversy. The other part was that Seltzer was a white woman, and a middle-class one at that, blatantly appropriating black culture. If she&amp;#039;d drawn herself as a foster child living with a poor, white family in the Ozark foothills, the firestorm would likely have been less intense. &amp;quot;For so long there are people who haven&amp;#039;t had voices, who couldn&amp;#039;t get their work in print, who couldn&amp;#039;t talk about themselves, and for a white privileged woman to speak in the voice of this group is very insulting,&amp;quot; says Naomi Zack, a multiracial philosophy professor at the University of Oregon (she never taught Seltzer), one of many faculty members who debated the controversy in The Register-Guard, the Eugene daily. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the part of the problem that she has that A Million Little Pieces did not.&amp;quot; Seltzer may be the first to attempt such a racially charged charade in recent memory, but the phenomenon is not unprecedented. There is, in fact, a long tradition of &amp;quot;ethnic impostor&amp;quot; autobiographies. Laura Browder, an English professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, wrote a book chronicling the most well known, many of which are still in print and possess striking parallels to Seltzer. I Am a Woman\u2014and a Jew, by Elizabeth Stern, which purported to be a true tale of the Jewish immigrant experience, was exposed as fiction by her own son. Famous All Over Town by Danny Santiago was supposedly the memoir of a Mexican-American boy growing up in the rough-and-tumble barrio of East L.A. Soon after it was published, it was revealed to have been written by Daniel James, a seventysomething, Yale-educated screenwriter. Taking the voice of a young Latino, James later explained, was the only way he could get past his writer&amp;#039;s block.  Ethnic impostors seem to have an affinity for Native Americans, probably, as Browder notes, because of our national romanticization of their lost culture, and the fact that not much has been written from an insider&amp;#039;s perspective. One of the most infamous was Sylvester Long, a mixed-race janitor in North Carolina whose parents were former slaves. Long reinvented himself as Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance and wrote an autobiography. The book caused such a sensation in the 1920s that he became the Depression-era equivalent of an A-list party &amp;quot;get.&amp;quot; He starred in the first all\u2013Native American movie, The Silent Enemy, and hawked his own line of running shoes. But there was constant pressure to be &amp;quot;on&amp;quot; at all times in order to keep the charade in play. He found himself performing, says Browder, for people who hated nonwhites, which is, of course, what he really was. &amp;quot;He had escaped one trap but boxed himself into another,&amp;quot; Browder notes. A few years later, he shot himself at the home of a Hollywood socialite. A more recent example is The Education of Little Tree by Forrest Carter. Like Love, it&amp;#039;s a lost child narrative, this one about an orphan raised by his Cherokee grandparents. When it was published in the 1970s, Clint Eastwood optioned the movie rights and Barbara Walters called for an interview. After Carter appeared on her show, folks from his Alabama town recognized that he was not Forrest but Asa Carter, a rabid Klansman. For part of his career, Carter had been a speechwriter for George Wallace, the governor of Alabama, and penned the &amp;quot;Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!&amp;quot; speech Wallace delivered at his inauguration. How Carter thought he would get away with this duplicity is anyone&amp;#039;s guess. &amp;quot;In the mornings he&amp;#039;s writing about a young Cherokee boy who has a relationship with a kindly Jewish peddler, and in the evenings he&amp;#039;s giving speeches that Hitler was right,&amp;quot; says Browder. &amp;quot;It speaks to our complexity as humans and our ability to compartmentalize to a really crazy degree.&amp;quot; But how much can someone truly compartmentalize? Can you tell a story so many times that you even trick yourself into believing that it&amp;#039;s true? It&amp;#039;s exhausting just contemplating the effort that Long or Carter or Seltzer had to muster to keep their alternate realities functioning and distinct. According to Wendy Berry Mendes, a sociobiological psychologist and associate professor at Harvard, it&amp;#039;s precisely that effort that, on a cognitive level, separates a fabricated experience from an experienced reality. If you were to outfit the brain with electrodes to monitor activity, you&amp;#039;d see &amp;quot;different regions of the brain that respond to self-relevant information based on memory and past episodes, and areas that are not related to the self,&amp;quot; Mendes says. &amp;quot;The constructed ideas are always going to be different in some way than memories that are actually experienced and felt. So, can you actually ever truly fool yourself? There&amp;#039;s great data that shows no. But it&amp;#039;s amazing how risky people are, isn&amp;#039;t it?&amp;quot; Seltzer&amp;#039;s explanation for her deception was one of altruism. She was trying to give a voice to the voiceless. &amp;quot;For whatever reason,&amp;quot; she told the Times, &amp;quot;[I] thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don&amp;#039;t listen to.... I just felt that there was good that I could do.&amp;quot; And in the book, which not many, including her critics, had the opportunity to read, there doesn&amp;#039;t seem to be a trace of malicious intent or mockery. &amp;quot;She clearly had feelings for the community,&amp;quot; says NPR&amp;#039;s Michel Martin, who is black and who conducted a long interview with Seltzer as Jones before the scandal broke. &amp;quot;I think she thought she was helping.&amp;quot; So did Reverend James Jones Jr. of Gangsters for Christ Ministries. When Seltzer called him last fall to ask if he would introduce her to people when promoting her book, he thought she was &amp;quot;sent from God.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;d been looking for a way to counsel foster kids who were &amp;quot;put in a perfect position to be recruited by gangs&amp;quot; and thought she was literally an answer to his prayers. He also thought she was black. Even after he found out the book was fiction, he still thought she was black. There was her accent and the fact that she&amp;#039;d been referred to him by Madd Ronald, aka Ronald Chatman, who was a former member of the Bloods and an associate and friend of Jones. When they spoke, she&amp;#039;d mentioned the different parts of South Central where she&amp;#039;d lived. &amp;quot;I would have been able to tell if she slipped up one time and gave me a Crip neighborhood,&amp;quot; Jones says. Even the cell phone number she&amp;#039;d left him had an Inglewood area code. &amp;quot;Inglewood is Blood territory,&amp;quot; he explains. &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s up in Oregon with an Inglewood number. She wasn&amp;#039;t haphazard. She did her research.&amp;quot; While she was living in Sherman Oaks, Seltzer spent a semester at Ulysses S. Grant High School, a public school in Valley Glen, where the predominantly Hispanic students come from lower- to middle-class backgrounds; she told the Times that she&amp;#039;d kept in touch with friends from there, which contributed to her frame of reference. She also, as she says in her video, spent a lot of time on her computer. Intrepid bloggers speculated that years prior she&amp;#039;d been testing out her thug persona on an AOL journal &amp;quot;Beriousb,&amp;quot; posting under the screen name blastedagronaut: &amp;quot;im jus a gurl...a simple one at that,&amp;quot; read one entry. &amp;quot;I was a soldier once, but I think I am semi-retired now. Don&amp;#039;t doubt that I am doing my work still, only what that work is has changed.&amp;quot; An argonaut, assuming that&amp;#039;s what Seltzer meant to pun on, is &amp;quot;an adventurer engaged in a quest,&amp;quot; originating from Jason and the Argonauts, the Greek mythological heroes who sailed on the Argo in search of the Golden Fleece. L.A. gangs weren&amp;#039;t the first outsider subculture Seltzer tried to write herself into. When she first got to the University of Oregon in the early &amp;#039;90s\u2014she was a student but she never graduated, contrary to her claims\u2014she took a Native American literature class with professor Gordon Sayre. She turned in poems and short stories about her experience growing up on the nearby Quinault Indian reservation. It was a story she also told outside the classroom, sometimes to an irritating degree. As a student she got a job at Starbucks. Her supervisor was constantly fielding complaints &amp;quot;due to incessant chatter about her Native American heritage when she should&amp;#039;ve been cranking out the lattes.&amp;quot; Coworkers were suspicious of her story and her &amp;quot;passing mention of gangbanging&amp;quot; but she presented just enough of a convincing picture that no one could be sure. &amp;quot;Margaret had her slang down to a science even at that time,&amp;quot; says a former student, &amp;quot;so it made people less likely to really challenge her hard-to-believe-but-perhaps-true claims.&amp;quot; At the same time that she was spinning tales of reservation life, Seltzer immersed herself in another outsider culture\u2014the radical environmental activist group Cascadia Forest Defenders. In an effort to save old growth forests, members blocked off roads from loggers and literally took up residence in old trees. &amp;quot;She was involved in bringing food to people. She said she lived in a tree herself for some months,&amp;quot; says Sayre, adding, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m less likely to believe that now.&amp;quot; She was also part of a collective that did support work for Jeff Luers, the eco-activist sentenced to nearly 23 years in prison for setting fire to three SUVs at a Chevrolet dealership in Eugene. (According to friends, Rya&amp;#039;s father was an activist Seltzer met through the group.) At the time, says a current Luers supporter, Seltzer looked more granola than thug. She dressed in simple T-shirts and Carhartts. Her hair was shaved at one point and &amp;quot;kind of punk.&amp;quot; Seltzer&amp;#039;s duties were largely clerical. She checked the group&amp;#039;s post office box and deposited donations into their bank account. The balance went toward Luers&amp;#039; legal fees and prison-spending money. Then one day, &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t know what prompted it,&amp;quot; says the Luers supporter, &amp;quot;she just dropped out. She pretty much just dropped the ball and didn&amp;#039;t even tell anyone she wasn&amp;#039;t doing it. This was a person providing primary support for Jeff. We just had to pick up the pieces.&amp;quot; By the time Muscio met Seltzer in 2004, her South Central story had taken center stage. Muscio says she was raising red-nosed pit bulls, writing about life in the hood, and would date only black guys. At the suggestion of a former ethnic studies teacher, Seltzer sent some of her work to Muscio, who was at work on a book about racism and imperialism. Muscio was impressed. She put Seltzer in touch with her agent, Faye Bender. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s the thing,&amp;quot; says Muscio, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m the genius who came up with that idea.&amp;quot; Muscio lived a couple hours away in Portland, but they became good friends\u2014the kind who get pedicures together and talk weekly. Seltzer already owned the same charming four-bedroom bungalow she was photographed in for the House &amp;amp;amp; Home story, which had a gigantic kitchen and a garden full of roses and vegetables. She had gotten some money from Starbucks when she quit, as Muscio understood it, and her family was also helping her out financially as they were trying to reconnect. (Seltzer&amp;#039;s parents declined to comment.) Muscio would drive down for the weekend and &amp;quot;Peggy,&amp;quot; as friends call her, would cook big dinners with lots of kids running around. Those who knew her describe Seltzer as an affectionate mother. She loved to feed people, Muscio says, most often with Big Mom&amp;#039;s soul food\u2014biscuits and gravy, fried chicken. Muscio says she met Steven Moore, the man photographed with Seltzer in the Times who was supposedly convalescing from a gunshot wound, and Ronald Chatman, the onetime Blood who&amp;#039;d put Seltzer in touch with Reverend Jones. Seltzer initially contacted Chatman, who wrote for an online zine about gang life called Streetgangs.com and is a supporter of the gangpeace movement. They developed a long-distance friendship and in 2003, after six of his &amp;quot;homies&amp;quot; had been shot, Seltzer invited him up to Eugene to escape and decompress. &amp;quot;I said, `Eugene, Oregon? What kind of gangs are up there?&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Chatman recalls. He spent a few months living with Seltzer and taking in country life with no gunshots or police helicopters. &amp;quot;She educated me on so many different types of things, simple things that would seem funny,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Like how to tell a maple tree by looking at the leaves.&amp;quot; Chatman never questioned her story. Neither did Muscio. But thinking back on it, she says she shudders at how deeply woven the fiction was in Seltzer&amp;#039;s life. She remembers a time when she was wearing a blue shirt and Seltzer told her how she&amp;#039;d been raped by Crips, whose signature color is blue. &amp;quot;She wasn&amp;#039;t being mean or judgmental, she just kind of let me know that the color blue really brought that up and she didn&amp;#039;t like to be around it. From that point on, whenever I was going to hang around with her I made a conscious choice not to wear blue. But that did not happen to her. It happened to somebody, maybe. But not her.&amp;quot; Muscio is distraught by Seltzer&amp;#039;s betrayal, and says, &amp;quot;The foundations of my trust have been shattered.&amp;quot; She struggles to explain why her friend lied, even to her. &amp;quot;I think her life is like a mosaic,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;There are these tiles that correspond to the lives of people that she met, and she took these little tiles and made this big picture.&amp;quot; Just like Forrest/Asa Carter and Sylvester Long and Elizabeth Stern and all the other ethnic autobiographer impostors that came before her, Seltzer&amp;#039;s hoax was doomed to be exposed. Especially since, for reasons that would not make her a promising spy candidate, she let her original life and her gang life intermingle. Her &amp;quot;bio-family,&amp;quot; as she referred to the Seltzers, would even come up to Eugene to visit and meet her friends. Muscio recalls how she found herself in Seltzer&amp;#039;s living room one day making small talk with Seltzer&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;bio&amp;quot; mother. Muscio believed Seltzer&amp;#039;s story that she had been abused by a relative and consequently, after child services intervened, wound up in foster care. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m in the house with her parents, nice middle-class people, and I believe this whole story, this whole history,&amp;quot; Muscio says, &amp;quot;but it&amp;#039;s deeply intimate and I&amp;#039;m not going to say anything to them about it,&amp;quot; she says, marveling. &amp;quot;So we talk about gardening.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s hard to understand how someone who had worked so hard and for so long to build a persona so at odds with her beginnings would then leave herself that vulnerable to exposure.  &amp;quot;I can think of two reasons,&amp;quot; says professor Naomi Zack. &amp;quot;It could be performance art. There are people who dress up and go out in public presenting themselves in ways that they&amp;#039;re not. The other could be a real psychological, delusional system.&amp;quot; Possibly as a way of dealing with her own perceived suffering or feelings of unhappiness or victimization, Browder suggests, Seltzer adopted the Jones persona as a way &amp;quot;to attach herself to an identity that spoke of legitimate authenticity and suffering.&amp;quot; An identity that was much more intense and, frankly, more interesting and dynamic than that of a white middle- class girl from the Valley. It&amp;#039;s unclear to what extent Seltzer believed her own lies. Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and social behavior at the University of California, Irvine, and the preeminent authority on false memory, notes that Seltzer &amp;quot;was constantly getting reinforcement&amp;quot; from friends, teachers, and acquaintances from the hood to whom she&amp;#039;d reached out, which could have helped propel her story forward. Or maybe Seltzer had an even larger group of enablers. Perhaps she intuitively understood that our photoshopping, PR doctoring, genetically engineering, avatar-constructing ways have gotten the best of us. We&amp;#039;re choking on the fiction in our lives, and just as on TV, where reality programming has overtaken the classic sitcom, people have reached a point where they are desperate to consume what they perceive to be real experiences. It&amp;#039;s an explanation, if not a justification, for the recent rash of fake memoirs, according to author David Shields, who explores the idea in his book Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Random House), out next year. We&amp;#039;re lied to every second of the day by politicians, by advertisers, by religious leaders, by sports commentators, by media outlets, and the lies are so thick and so constant that we&amp;#039;re obsessed with real events because we hardly experience any, Shields argues. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re trying to somehow touch ground, touch rock. Get to something real, and Margaret, this down girl, or Frey&amp;#039;s alcoholism and drug addiction or J. T. Leroy&amp;#039;s sex carnival of a life\u2014it&amp;#039;s like their pain is real. To me it&amp;#039;s always about pain. It&amp;#039;s like, Wow, we&amp;#039;re actually experiencing something, because it&amp;#039;s so hard to experience anything in a highly mediated culture.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s a grand scale version of the teenage girl who takes a razor blade to her forearm because feeling actual physical pain can cut through the emotional numbness. The irony, of course, is that capturing &amp;quot;the real&amp;quot; is about as hopeless a mission as Seltzer happily living her life as Margaret Jones, since the very act of conjuring reality in writing, filtered as it is through language and memory, is by nature fictionalizing. And because each person&amp;#039;s idea of what&amp;#039;s real to them is unique and singular, Shields and Zack, among other Seltzer sympathizers, suggest that we classify memoirs not as journalism, to be fact-checked and pulled from the shelf, but as literature, or &amp;quot;lyric poetry,&amp;quot; in Shields&amp;#039; phrase. When we read a confessional poem by Sylvia Plath or Robert Lowell, he remarks, we don&amp;#039;t question the veracity of it. Rather, &amp;quot;we understand it to be a voice based in the real but probably spiraling outward into poetic liberties, using the self as a launching pad to get at other, larger human truths.&amp;quot; Even Reverend Jones thinks the book could have been of use. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a Rocky story,&amp;quot; he says. And perhaps most persuasively, none other than Chatman, whose life experience clearly influenced Seltzer, notes, &amp;quot;I can say from my knowing her that those are stories that if they weren&amp;#039;t hers, she had been told by others that had lived and experienced them and that they needed to be told.&amp;quot; He continues, &amp;quot;Everybody thinks the world is a nice place, but they don&amp;#039;t understand the things that people are living through from day to day. First of all, someone has to have the nerve to speak on it. Second of all, someone had to have the voice. In my eyes and in my opinion she was very brave to even put that out there and express it. If those weren&amp;#039;t her stories she was even braver, because she knew the consequences.&amp;quot; This is the first time an ethnic impostor work was recalled, according to Browder. Stern&amp;#039;s book is still featured in women&amp;#039;s studies courses. Little Tree has sold well over a million copies to date and, in 1991, won the American Booksellers Association&amp;#039;s book of the year. And if Seltzer&amp;#039;s research\u2014lived and sought\u2014allowed her to create an affecting work, why can&amp;#039;t it stand? It&amp;#039;s a point of view that Sayre, Seltzer&amp;#039;s professor, tried to put forth as her detractors piled on. He last heard from Seltzer in February, shortly before Love was to be published. She gave him an advance copy and signed it, &amp;quot;Thank you for all your support with my writing. Here it finally is after all these years, in print.&amp;quot; Looking back on it now, &amp;quot;I feel duped,&amp;quot; Sayre says. &amp;quot;But I would give a lot to be able to talk to her again. Peggy was still the most interesting undergraduate I ever met.&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/books/reviews/a9351/my-so-called-life-25260/>