Tuesday, March 04, 2008

And it continues

Somewhat more forgivable than making up hooey about surviving death camps and being raised by wolves, but still...
Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she told in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”

1 comment:

Johnny said...

After seeing the old "why didn't she just call it a novel?" argument one too many times, I finally wrote something about that on my blog:

http://babyruthless.blogspot.com/2008/03/big-mom-must-be-so-disappointed.html

(Feel free to delete this comment if it this comes off as overly self-promotional...it seemed weird to paste all of that into this comment box and pretend I just wrote it.)