It seems every time you pick up a newspaper, someone new is issuing a mea culpa for having written, published, or promoted a completely fake memoir. Starting with Rigoberta Menchu, back in the '90s, then continuing through James Frey and his Million Little Pieces to the middle-aged woman who wrote about being a male teen prostitute named JT LeRoy.
This week, we have Margaret Seltzer, who wrote under the pen name Margaret [Peggy] B. Jones and sold a true-to-life book called Love & Consequences. It took her three years to pen this memoir about her young life as a girl gang banger in south Los Angeles and her subsequent salvation at the hands of an African-American foster mother she called Big Mom. Only upon publication, it turned out Seltzer actually grew up in tony Sherman Oaks, CA, and she lived with her own biological parents (and the sister who ratted her out) until leaving for an expensive private school.
What's interesting about this story -- to me, at least -- is that Seltzer/Jones editor, Sarah McGrath, was MY editor, back when she was at Scribner and I was at work on my first novel, which we nicknamed Wild Ride. Sarah was a marvelous editor: dedicated, respectful, a real champion. There were times I thought she believed in my book more than I did. And I can easily see how a woman so enthusiastic about the art of the written word could get taken in.
But what does this have to do with food, you're asking? Well, funny thing. . . .
Around the same time Love & Consequences was being recalled, a chef named Robert Irvine, host of the Food Network's Dinner Impossible, was busted as well.
It seems Irvine lied on his official resume, saying he'd cooked for President Bush and Princess Diana and somewhere along the line been knighted by the queen. He did none of these things. Nor did he graduate from the University of Leeds.
What he did was star in a successful television show for more than a year -- a program that one reviewer said was like James Bond meets MacGyver -- serving impromptu gourmet meals to hundreds of people. He was entertaining and the food was good.
So what, I ask, does his past have to do with it?
Did he lie? Well, of course he did. Let's take a look at YOUR official resume, check the grade point average you listed, the dates of employment for that managerial job you actually held for only two and a half months while your boss was out dead.
And, to come full circle, I'm not sure why readers are so terribly upset about the memoir, either. (McGrath's publishing house, Penguin, has not only recalled all copies in bookstores, they've even offered a refund to anyone who bought the book.) Jones apparently wrote a fabulous book, one that New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani called "humane and deeply affecting." Well, isn't it still. . . .true to life or not?
I'm puzzled, you see, by the point of all these recriminations. It would appear to me that Seltzer was being paid to tell a good story and Irvine to cook great meals. Each did exactly as she or he was assigned. And, yes, greased their reputations along the way. But given they showed real talent -- producing work that other people benefited from and enjoyed -- I would ask: What's the real harm?
You would have thought the dedicated, knowledgeable staff (/sarcasm) of Food Network would have stopped and wondered what the hell a chef was doing messing with anyone's wedding cake, much less a wedding cake as significant and important as PRINCESS DIANA's.
Wedding cakes come under the domain of pastry chefs.
Everyone SHOULD know that -- baking has long been considered the more scientific side of the culinary world, while cooking is more of a freeform skill.
I always thought his list of accomplishments at the beginning of Dinner: Impossible was deliberately over-the-top to set up an attitude and atmosphere for the style of the show.
You have made a very silly argument. Irvine was essentially a naval catering cook. He lied and got himself a TV show, a book deal, and a line of cookware. More seriously though he lied about himself and his experience in order to get investors for some restaurants. It is one thing to create and exploit gray areas of your experience. It's quite another to blatantly make up stories that just didn't happen. Irvine went around telling people that he was knighted by the Queen and that she had given him a castle in Scotland. That's a little more than embellishing.
One has to ask would the Food Network have giving a show to an unknown former navy cook who sold dried fruit online? Would any of the deals he got have happened? They hired a guy who wasn't what he said. Irvine, a grown up, played a game and got caught. Never bet more than you can afford to lose.
Perhaps I was being too subtle --
Irvine's claims have always been ridiculous and over the top with obvious problems, yet he was only caught now, following multiple seasons of the show, a celebuchef cookbook, product endorsement deals, etc.
I fail to see how that is a silly argument.
My point was that there were obvious embellishments, and his story/resume/claims should have been investigated or verified before the Food Network started rolling their greed machine.
Wal-Mart requires background and reference checks before hiring anyone; this standard is non-negotiable. One would hope that anyone offered a job with the influence of television media would be required to meet the same standard as a person who stocks green beans and dog food.
The "little picture" is that we have caught a very public liar.
The "big picture" is that the various media corporations (Food Network, book publishing, etc.) are so focused on mass-marketing and marketing tie-ins that they only focus on marketability and potential revenue via product and marketing tie-in rather than credibility, accuracy and ethics.
My real problem here is how marketability trumps talent and sincerity.
"What's the real harm?"
There is harm when privileged white people think they can appropriate POC/lower-class people's lives and experiences and make money from it. Margaret Seltzerwas getting paid to write a memoir, not fiction, and she got caught. Let this be a lesson to others who think that they can cash in on "street life" while they continue to live in their comfortable homes.
I'll bite: She wasn't just being paid to write a good book, she was being paid to write a book about her life. It would be necessary to actually live it.
I'll bite, too. She presented it as a memoir to the publishing house because she knew damn well that it would carry more weight, garner more acclaim, and Sell Lots of Copies if readers thought "oh my gosh, that's her real life."
It was a calculated move on the author's part. The book would be just as good if it were labeled "fiction," and "novel," but she knew it wouldn't sell as well.
An analogy can be drawn to the huge publicity machine behind Diablo Cody (aka to her parents as Brooke Busey-Hunt) - why the giant focus on a screenwriter? Because - oh wow! gasp! - she used to be a stripper. Which has absofuckinlutely nothing to do with her movie, June.
Do fiction and real life blur in books? Sure. But there's a tipping point, and when it's reached (think Frey and now Seltzer), the author's intention - to make more money - turns what I believe is a real, honorable bond between writer and reader - into cynicism and disrespect.