Hoaxes and Plagiarism

[Alex Linder]

[Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN]

Watch for TMQ's Shocking True Memoir, "My Life as a Secret Agent for George Washington During the Revolutionary War": In the offseason the highly promoted shocking memoir of barrio girl gang life in Los Angeles, "Love and Consequences," turned out to be a fabrication, written by an upper-class white woman. Around the same time it was revealed that "Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years" also is a fake. James Frey's 2003 No. 1-ranked "A Million Little Pieces," the 1998 bestseller "Fragments" and the bestselling "Mutant Message Down Under" are other highly promoted volumes, sold as shocking truth, that were fabrications. "Mutant Message," which hit No. 1 in 1994, claimed to be the shocking authentic account of a woman who lived with Australian aboriginals and learned a cosmic secret about the fate of humanity; it turned out the author had never even been to Australia. "The Celestine Prophecy," one of publishing history's great successes -- some 20 million copies sold -- was originally promoted as the true account of the author's quest for an ancient Peruvian manuscript that could bring world peace; evil government agents would stop at nothing to kill him! "The Celestine Prophecy" is still in stores, now sold as a novel. The 2002 bestseller "Running with Scissors" was marketed as a memoir. After it made the author wealthy, he settled a lawsuit from people whose identities were implied by the text, and who claimed fabrication; as part of the settlement, the author agreed to call what he had written a "book" rather than a "memoir."

Here, Motoko Rich of the New York Times details how publisher Penguin Group USA and the New York Times itself fell for the "Love and Consequences" hoax book, which the Times lavishly praised when circulated for review. A Penguin editor spent three years working with hoax author "Margaret B. Jones," whose real name turns out to be Margaret Seltzer, without, the publisher claims, ever suspecting anything was amiss. This, despite "Jones" writing a memoir of a crime-ravished inner-city foster-home childhood when Seltzer actually "grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles and graduated from a private Episcopal school." Penguin asserts with a straight face that the company never noticed a woman claiming to have experienced a traumatic inner-city childhood in foster homes had the mannerisms of a private prep school.

The problem is that publishers don't want to know if books are true.

The problem, as with Frey and other bookstore liars, is that the publisher did not want to know what was true. For Margaret Seltzer of Sherman Oaks to invent a fictional account of inner-city gang life is a perfectly respectable thing to do, but such a book must be marketed as a novel, and the vast majority of novels sink without a trace. If on the other hand the book is marketed as a shocking, astonishing true story, sales are likely. So the publisher didn't want to know.

The incident serves to remind us of something important about the world of books: Though books are seen as the ultimate carriers of veracity, books are not fact-checked! I wrote an Atlantic Monthly story in the offseason, and spent several excruciating days going over the piece line-by-line with a super-efficient fact-checker, who wanted documentation for each claim down to whether the sky is blue. Everything I've ever published in The Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the New Republic has been elaborately fact-checked; even much of what ESPN.com publishes is now fact-checked. Yet books are not fact-checked. Penguin's defense of its incredible screw-up was that authors, not publishers, warrant the truth of books. This is indeed the standard of the publishing industry, and when controversy arises, publishers often say they never claimed to have the slightest idea whether the book was true (this was Frey's publisher's defense). Responsible book authors do not abuse the privilege of author warrant: Many, including me, even hire their own fact-checkers. Swindlers such as Frey and Seltzer abuse the author-warrant standard to perpetrate fraud at the bookstore. Though Seltzer was caught before she lined her pockets, Frey and other hoax book authors have gotten to keep fraudulently obtained royalties. Frey also keeps his status as a celebrity, which he never would have become had he told the truth.

The outcome is like CEOs who overpay themselves -- they are caught, but get to keep the money. What worries me is that readers do not, by and large, understand that the truth threshold for many books is incredibly low.