Dang, it’s only March and we’ve already discovered who’s been plagiarizing in the literary world.
My sister forwarded me the new story about Margaret Seltzer who has finally admitted that her memoir, A Refugee From Gangland, is a complete load of bullshit. The book illustrates her supposed adolescence growing up in a foster family in South Central Los Angeles and becoming a drug dealer. Someone’s been watching The Wire a little too closely.
In the vividly told book, Ms. Seltzer wrote about her African-American foster brothers, Terrell and Taye, who joined the Bloods gang when they were 11 and 13. She chronicled her experiences making drug deliveries for gang leaders at age 13 and how she was given her first gun as a birthday present when she was 14. (link)
Here’s the first best part. Seltzer actually grew up in Sherman Oaks–quite far from the gang-torn neighborhoods of South LA–and went to my elementary school.
Margaret B. Jones is a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, who is all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.
Hahaha, this is awesome. Campbell Hall has to be one of the most sheltered, snobbiest and whitest schools in Los Angeles. Actually wait, that goes for all the private schools. But my memories there include my third grade teacher condescendingly explaining how good the school was for employing Mexicans on the staff (aka janitors) and every year, the school would throw a giant Bagpipers Ball to raise funds. There was one black kid in my class but he disappeared after fourth grade, and this was over the entire 6 years I was there. And the only gangs we would encounter would be a herd of pigeons on the football field.
It’s equally as amusing to read the New York Times’ review of her book, before they knew that it wasn’t fake. I mean, how eye roll worthy are some of Seltzer’s quotes? Not only did the publishers (or the journalist) fail to do any proper fact-checking, but couldn’t even see past the utter crap this lady was saying.
For example, after getting knocked up, she describes:
Rya’s father, she said, was “the first white guy I ever dated, and she was the first white baby I ever saw. I said, she looks sickly, is there something wrong with her?”
REALLY? You ARE WHITE. You don’t even know what a white baby looks like? Plus, knowing that she probably spent 85% of her school days around white people, she was straight out lying about the dumbest things.
Or,
“The first time my o. g. visited me here” — meaning original gangster, the gang’s leader — “he slept 20 hours straight. In L.A. your anxiety is so high you sleep three hours a night.”
Thanks for explaining to me what OG meant. I had no idea.
Then she mixed up a batch of perfect buttermilk corn bread without measuring anything. “I make it so much I can eyeball it,” she said. “I’m working on a cookbook right now. Big Mom would roll over in her grave, knowing I’m giving her recipes away.”
OH NO YOU DID NOT JUST BRING IN THE CORNBREAD.
It’s sad to think that much of her experience is real, but through the minds of adolescents actually growing up in horrible, violent environments. They may have been Seltzer’s friends, but to profit from their stories is pretty fucking messed up.
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