Memoir of gangbanging, drug dealing is fake

[Beachlife!]

Originally Posted by Canuckistan

I'm confused. What are you "But Clinton"ing?

How could a comment about Al Gore's documentary as a response a comment about Moore's 'documentary' be "But Clinton"ing?

[Canuckistan]

Originally Posted by Beachlife!

How could a comment about Al Gore's documentary as a response a comment about Moore's 'documentary' be "But Clinton"ing?

Is that was that was? I couldn't tell. It seemed like a "But Clinton" type thing to me. Perhaps Sly Dog can clarify.

[Simply Madeline]

Post #18

Just look at all the fact checking that goes on after the fact with Michael Moore's movies.

Post #19

Or even Al Gore's?

To what else would it be referring?

[MooseMacD]

Originally Posted by putitinwriting

Not quite. If a movie is billed as an actual documentary, but is found to be fictional, there would certainly be this level of trouble. Just look at all the fact checking that goes on after the fact with Michael Moore's movies.

"This movie is based on a true story, wink wink" is more closely related to telling a campfire story that starts out, "So, this all happened right here 20 years ago tonight." It's an accepted part of story telling, but it's not supposed to be taken at face value.

I have to agree - a movie pitched/marketed as a documentary would be under more scrutiny than a movie pitched as "based on a true story".

With a book, I think it's the same thing. A memoir or auto-biography (OT: is there a difference?) is presumed to be true (or true to the author's memory) because it happened to them, and they are telling the story. The same level of scrutiny should apply to any sort of factual book - history, biography, science, etc.

If a book is fiction, or even "based on a true story", then I believe a lot more leeway is given regarding the veracuty of the story.

[barbrainey]

The author actually worked with young people who lived in central LA, and she no doubt felt their pain and decided to write about it.

The problem is this: if she wanted to write about such experiences, why didn't she just create a work of fiction and call it a composite case study based on real-life experiences? However, since she wrote a "true story" and claimed that it was about her, she was being deceptive. Her puiblisher thought it was all about her. And her readers would have, of course.''

It was a deception, clear and plain.

B. A. Rainey

[snopes]

Another falsehood has emerged in the story of a privileged young white woman from Sherman Oaks whose memoir, "Love and Consequences," described her violent early years as a racially mixed foster child and drug-runner for the Bloods in South Central.

Like those gangland tales, Margaret B. Jones' claim that she co-founded a Los Angeles foundation to help street kids appears to be fiction.

http://www.latimes.com/features/book...,5286869.story

[snopes]

Originally Posted by putitinwriting

"This movie is based on a true story, wink wink" is more closely related to telling a campfire story that starts out, "So, this all happened right here 20 years ago tonight." It's an accepted part of story telling, but it's not supposed to be taken at face value.

In other words, "willing suspension of disbelief."

The Scarlet Letter purports to be a true story, but I haven't seen anyone decrying it lately for not standing up to fact checking.

- snopes

[snopes]

Why so many frauds? We love tell-alls, and careless publishers love money.

http://www.latimes.com/news/printedi...3004706.column

[Cervus]

Originally Posted by Gayle

When they canceled her book tour, she told them she didn't need them. She didn't need anything. Except this ashtray. And this paddle game. Just this ashtray, this paddle game, and this chair...

I'm so glad I'm not the only one who had quotes from that movie pop into their head upon reading the article.

[missy_pooh_1997]

What I found immediately strange was her being a white child being placed with a black family. I know a few people who have taken in foster kids and/or adopted and I have yet to see any white children placed with black families. I've seen the opposite many times.

[Sara@home]

Originally Posted by missy_pooh_1997

What I found immediately strange was her being a white child being placed with a black family. I know a few people who have taken in foster kids and/or adopted and I have yet to see any white children placed with black families. I've seen the opposite many times.

I know a white woman who as a child was placed with a black foster family. It was in Baltimore, 20ish years ago. Essentially, she was placed with a family who had a bed available and who accepted girls her age.

[snopes]

To be sure, phony memoirs aren’t news: in 1998 the acclaimed child-survivor memoir “Fragments” was proved a fake, and more recently James Frey’s credibility infamously exploded into a million little pieces. But the trickle now seems to be a flood. Just days after the revelations about Ms. De Wael’s book yet another popular first-person account of extreme suffering turned out to be a fraud. (This one, “Love and Consequences,” purports to be the autobiography of a young half-white, half-American Indian woman who was raised by a black foster mother in the gang-infested streets of Los Angeles.) This trend sheds alarming light on a cultural moment in which the meanings of suffering, identity and “reality” itself seem to have become dangerously slippery.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/op...endelsohn.html

[Blatherskite]

Originally Posted by barbrainey

The problem is this: if she wanted to write about such experiences, why didn't she just create a work of fiction and call it a composite case study based on real-life experiences?

Because many people would dismiss a composite character as basically fiction, and a fictional environment is less provocative even when real situations are used. Perhaps the author of this book wanted to get across what she experienced as the true nature of gangs and drug dealing without her readers falling into the 'At least it's only fiction' indifference. The fact that's it's a well-off white woman doing the telling also casts doubt on her claims. The attitude is 'Well, what would she know about it?', even though she claims to have real life experience.

And telling it from her first person perspective gives the reader an individual character that's somewhat easier to sympathy with than a 'he', 'she' or 'they'.

I'm not saying that lying through a memoir is perfectly OK (in fact it might even be worse for her cause now the the beans have been spilled) but I can sort of understand why she did it.

[Not_Done_Living]

So that's two people in recent history who have made money off of "tough tales of the street" billed as true, and found to be not true..

i have lived the life they write about, and have the scars (emotional and physical), witnesses, and (police/medical) records to prove it.

I have often thought of writing a book of my experiences growing up in Toronto as Queen St. Punk street kid, but when i sit down to write it i get the "nah, no one would believe this" thought and give up. maybe i should actually do it.

as an aside... i am actually in the process of organizing a re-union of the people from my old neighborhood, who lived/shared these experiences with me.. i am amazed at just how many of us "messed up kids" actually made something of ourselves.. my SO was reading some of the stories on the reunion website, stories that i have told her over the years as "when i was youngs" and she actually admitted that when i told them to her, she thought they were lies, or exaggerations at the least.. but to see them come back and being discussed by others who i havn't talked to in 17 years... her image of me has changed quite a bit.

[snopes]

Whatever you might think about Margaret B. Jones (née Seltzer) -- liar, poseur, misguided, subject of a cautionary tale -- one thing is certain: She stumbled upon the jackpot equation when it comes to the publishing world.

Her recipe -- half-white, "half-Native American" foster child living in gritty South-Central Los Angeles who gang-banged and ran drugs and lived to tell about it -- not only got the literary world's attention but its salivary glands going. And the key was presenting this concoction as nonfiction. That's what made it edgy, sexy, cinematic.

http://www.calendarlive.com/books/cl...,5871455.story

[Malruhn]

So why did the article use quote marks around "half-Native American" and not around "half-white??"

Things that make you go, "Hhmmmmmmm."

[snopes]

Originally Posted by Malruhn

So why did the article use quote marks around "half-Native American" and not around "half-white"?

Presumably because the author described herself as "half-Native American" but not as half-white. Hence the former is a quote, but the latter is not.

- snopes