Monday, March 03, 2008

Today's fake: she wasn't half-native American or a gang chick

A woman who wrote a memoir about being a half white, half Native American gang chick who worked as a drug courier for South Central L.A. gangs made it all up, and the publisher is pulling all unsold copies and cancelling her book tour. Her rationale?
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.
She was found out when the New York Times published a profile of the author last week; her sister read it, agog, then called the publisher to squeal.

I wonder how many of these the publishing industry will take before the entire memoir genre becomes a thing of the past.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

When we got in copies of this book in the store, my coworker immediately turned it over a few times, read the jacket, looked at her picture, and said, "Huh, my first thought was, look at this white girl, this is probably bullshit. But it says here she's really from, South Central, so I guess I'm wrong..."
not 24 hours later, she was totally vindicated.