Citizen Jake

Imagine a powerful, moving memoir in which the writer is a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods. Is that something you’d like to read? I would. Now imagine a story about someone who is “all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, with her biological family” and never ran drugs for anyone. Which story would you rather read? The first one, obviously, which is what Margaret Seltzer, also know as Margaret B. Jones, also realized and which is why Ms. Seltzer pretended to be the first instead of writing about the second. Now her “memoir”, “Love and Consequences” is being recalled. Paging James Frey?