At least a few of you have probably heard the ongoing scandal surrounding Love and Consequences, the falsified memoir by Margaret Jones, a.k.a. Peggy Seltzer. I wouldn’t have given the issue much thought, except that Ms. Jones lives in my hometown, and accordingly, my hometown newspaper, The Register-Guard, has been providing copious coverage of the sordid details.
Oddly, a professor of English at the University of Oregon (from which, Ms. Jones claimed to have graduated) has come to her defense:
When early on the morning of March 4 I went out to get the newspaper and learned that I had read a novel, not a memoir, I was neither angry nor disappointed. If Peggy’s assertion that she had spent part of her childhood on the Quinault reservation was untrue, if the paper she had written about this experience was based on false premises, at least it was backed up by enough research to be convincing.
What a ridiculous defense of lying this is. If it’s convincing, it’s acceptable? A good end result is enough to wash away the sins of falsehood? What complete and utter horse shit. I’d like to say it amazes me that this kind of moral relativism passes for higher education, but, at least with respect to the UO, it doesn’t.
But with the exposure of Ms. Jones’ web of lies passed off as a memoir have come the inevitable debates on how much embellishment is too much. Linda Clare, a teacher at Lane Community College writes:
So, I tell them that in dramatizing a story, it’s sometimes necessary to embroider. But I add, “If you write that you got sick at Woodstock all over your boyfriend (one student did) but you actually hurled on your third cousin, nobody will care. But if you write that you got sick at Woodstock and you never went to Woodstock, that’s a problem.”…
If a memoir isn’t even in the ballpark of truth, we should have some way of communicating this to the unsuspecting public. Disclaimers, apparently, don’t work — perhaps because disclaimers are in the foreword and readers skip forewords. Scrutinized by legions of fact checkers, memoirists will still have to find compelling ways to tell the truth.
And truth can be boring. Readers aren’t going to stick around if tension and conflict are not coupled with rising action.
Life doesn’t necessarily follow the three-act structure or classic story arc. Life strays off-theme or takes a million years to get anywhere.
So, when telling an interesting story is the goal, lying is acceptable, according to Ms. Clare. I’ll have to remember that in future job interviews…
But my favorite take was this:
Shouldn’t trust be integral to the writer-reader relationships?
Remember, this wasn’t Jones saying that her black foster mother gave three-fourths of her weekly earnings to Margaret instead of one-quarter. This was a woman who said, among other lies, that she had a black foster mother when she didn’t.
An author has an unwritten contract with the reader; some even put it into words in a foreword or author’s note: “This is truth” or “this is fiction” or “this is truth but I’ve not used real names in some instances.”
Should trust be integral? If your goal is not to abuse your readers, and to instead create allies of them, sure. If you’re looking to convince your readers that something is worthy of attention and effort, such as the blight that can be inner city life, then you damn well better be honest about the situation you’re telling your readers needs their attention, lest they arrive to help and discover that what they thought they were helping doesn’t exist.
What I find truly fascinating is that here we have two instructors saying that tweaking the details is acceptable—one goes further than the other in this assertion—as long as the end product is interesting. I’m sorry, but if you have to tweak the details because reality isn’t all that intriguing and fails to grab your audience, then I propose you have no fucking business writing a memoir in the first place.
If you have something to say, a campfire story worth writing down, then by all means write it down and put it, and yourself, out there. And if you’re afraid that your story isn’t interesting, then have some fucking courage and let the open market dictate that. Don’t fluff and inflate it with lies and then complain about getting caught before the anticipated dollars started rolling in.
Ms. Jones, like other authors before her, has claimed that her publisher wouldn’t accept the novel marketed as fiction. If that’s so, then why not remove herself (and the lies thereof) from the story entirely, and make it a work of non-fiction about gang life in L.A.? It certainly sounds as if she had enough personal experience, material, stories, and contacts from her volunteer work to do exactly that.
Love and Consequences got exactly what it deserved with the whoppers found therein. Anyone feeling sympathy for Ms. Jones needs their moral compass adjusted.
