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Funny that her sister was the one to rat her out. I laughed when she said something about fact checking at the NYT.
Hilarious that the author of the "memoir" said she bought a burial plot at the age of 14. That doesn't really mesh with the whole invincible adolescence stage.
It is sad that she felt she had to lie to get this book published.
"Getting people's voices heard" by silencing them and stealing their stories seems a little counterproductive, if you ask me.
And the sister ratting her out is odd. I'd love to know the family dynamic -- I would certainly call my sister (not that I have a sister, but you know) before calling the newspaper.
From the comments section: "It is very curious that this book was reviewed by Ms. Kakutani, the lead book critic at the Times. I wonder if her decision to review the book was at all influenced by the fact that Ms. McGrath, editor of the book in question, is the daughter of Mr. McGrath, who, as the article states, works at the paper (and used to, I believe, be the editor of the Book Review, which the article does not state). Perhaps the Public Editor could comment on not only on how the lead book critic of the Times decided to review the book but also on the paper's decision to feature the author in the House and Home section without doing some pretty basic fact checking."
Although some of the scenes she has recreated from her youth (which are told in colorful, streetwise argot) can feel self-consciously novelistic at times, Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood.
Novelistic. Conjuring. Yes, hmmm, you could say that.
Once upon a time people were content to call their first-person narrative fiction.
yeah, but the problem was . . . people weren't buying fiction.
Over on MeFi, Peter McD claimed that he presented a fictional manuscript to a publisher, who then told him that they would publish it as a memoir but there was no way they'd publish it as a novel.
Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative-writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.
I know Inga Muscio, and she is probably so pissed that she's planning on killing this woman.
I like how she wanted to "give a voice to people who don't get listened to". By pretending to be them. Yeah, right. If she really wanted to get them a voice, she'd help THEM write THEIR memoirs. But there's no money in that, is there?
My "totally just made this up but I believe it anyway" theory: Lack of storytelling in our culture. I think we've erected a huge barrier between "true" (logical, prove-able, scientific) and "false" (emotional, metaphorical, spiritual) and we no longer think one's allowed to combine the two; we've also seriously devalued the "false" part of that spectrum. I suspect that a lot of memoirs (and history) in the past were as much fiction as truth, and I think there was more of a sense that one could learn from stories even if they weren't factually "true" -- there was kind of a middle ground of "emotionally true." Which I think is where most good religions (and literature) hang out.
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