scandal, thy name is Selzer

I spent too much time today reading up on the story of Peggy Selzer alias Margaret B. Jones, the latest hoax memoirist whose publishing deal has hit the fan. I happened upon the Times "Homes and Gardens" profile of Jones's house last week, and like 2/3 of the commenters responding to news of Selzer's comedown, I definitely felt like something was rotten in the state of Denmark. I'm not sure if it was Selzer's bourgeois aesthetic, the lack of a photo of the pit-bull tattoo she bragged about, or the idea that anyone raised in S. Central would refer to any part of Eugene as a "ghetto," but the story reeked of, if not fraud, the Times' fetishization of a certain iteration of the Horatio Alger myth.

On the one hand, I want to respond to the hordes asking why Selzer didn't just publish her memoir as fiction by pointing to the current craze for the "true story" evidenced not simply by the canonization of the memoir as the literary genre du jour but by the proliferation/success, on one side of the culture gap, of reality television and the gossip press anointing successive bad-girl saints of the hour, and on the other side, of Michael Moore's opus and This American Life. It certainly would have been a lot harder for Selzer to publish this book as fiction, although clearly multiple alternative routes were available to her, from the Adrian Nicole Leblanc style reportage of Random Family to the Dave Eggers' fictional biography style of What is the What? Still, I do believe the publishing industry deserves some scrutinizing for this one.

And yet the author in this memoir scandal warrants, I believe, almost more scrutiny than James Frey. And this is because of the attitude behind this comment: "For whatever reason...I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to...I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.” Instead of working to provide a forum for the voices of those who really could use it, Selzer took the money and the acclaim and appointed herself spokesmodel for a group of people about whom she seems to have had very circumscribed contact. Clearly, in order to create this public of a persona without thinking she would be recognized, Ms. Selzer must have erected some kind of elaborate delusion/denial framework. Yet it seems like a shockingly blatant example of cultural appropriation at its worst, and I suppose it's a good thing that it imploded so spectacularly. I only hope the dialogue in the wake of this scandal veers more in the direction of scrutinizing what/whose kinds of stories are getting traction in the publishing world than in the direction of "I could have told you her use of the outdated 'homegirl' gave her away."