This morning, I asked whether non-white editors and agents might have spotted Peggy Seltzer‘s fraud earlier, which led one GalleyCat reader to respond, “I would be willing to bet that there’s at least one copy editor, at least one lawyer, and a whole flock of underlings who didn’t buy that Margaret B. Jones‘ ‘memoir’ was real. I’d like to believe that many of us, regardless of race, would have spotted this book as a fake, but in the long run, unless we’re high up on the ladder, it would likely not have mattered.”
But another reader, taking note of Seltzer’s false claims to Native American heritage, spotted what could have been another red flag in Love and Consequences: Sherman Alexie‘s Reservation Blues, which Seltzer is sure to have read while pursuing that ethnic studies degree she never quite picked up from the University of Oregon, also features a wise maternal character named “Big Mom.” If anybody out there still has a copy of Seltzer’s fantasy and can tell me if the similarities run deeper, drop me a line!
Speaking of how much Seltzer got past her editors… A reader comments that Riverhead‘s verification process, which boiled down to looking at some pictures and letters Seltzer provided them, was ridiculously inadequate. “They did not call a single place to verify that any of it was true and not just burned off her own laptop?” she asks. “I can’t believe that these are the people the rest of us have to beg to even read our manuscripts… I would never hire a person based solely on what they provided and I’ve never been hired based on that.”
So where does the publisher go from here? “Seltzer probably signed a contract that said that what she was representing as fact was, indeed, fact,” comments one literary agent, preferring to remain anonymous. “Penguin should sue her for return of the advance and by doing so, scare the shit out of any fake memoirists in the future… It would be nice if a publisher with deep pockets went after one of these liars and scared away the one percent of memoirists who are fakes, so the other 99 percent can be treated fairly in the future.”