‘Gang girl’ author really a Valley Girl

Add Margaret B Jones to the growing list of authors whose memoirs turn out to be fiction. Her book, Love and Consequences, about a mixed-raced girl growing up in a foster home in a gang-ridden neighbourhood of Los Angeles, was praised by the critics. "What sets Ms Jones's humane and deeply affecting memoir apart," said the New York Times, "is not just that it's told from the point of view of a young girl coming of age in this world, but also that it focuses on the bonds of love and loyalty that can bind relatives and gang members together."

Now Margaret B Jones has been exposed as a fraud: it is a pseudonym for a 33-year-old woman called Peggy Seltzer who is white and grew up in the affluent Sherman Oaks area of LA's San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members.

The 19,000 copies of Love and Consequences distributed so far have been recalled. The publisher, Riverhead Books, a unit of Penguin, has cancelled a planned book tour due to start on Monday. And the New York Times website now runs the following disclaimer above its glowing review: The following review was published before Margaret B Jones admitted that her memoir, ‘Love and Consequences’, was largely fabricated.

'Jones' was unmasked when Seltzer's sister, Cyndi, saw her photograph in the New York Times last week and notified Riverhead Books. Seltzer admitted to the Times on Tuesday that her story 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.
 
In retrospect, some reviewers nearly smelled a rat. Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times said the scenes recreated from the author's youth "can feel self-consciously novelistic at times" while in Entertainment Weekly Vanessa Juarez wrote that "readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue".

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with 'Jones' for three years on the book, said: "It's very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn't have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light."

The scandal is doubly embarrassing because it was Riverside who published My Friend Leonard - the second book by James Frey to turn out to be a fraud: his first, A Million Little Pieces, landed him in trouble with Oprah Winfrey who admonished him on her TV show for duping her and the rest of the nation. Since then, questions have been raised about the veracity of Ishmael Beah's Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier and only last week it transpired that a moving Holocaust memoir by Misha Defonseca was entirely fabricated - and the author wasn't even Jewish. ·