Seltzer's whiteness is also coming up in the morning-after commentary: Seltzer's personal experiences gave her the authenticity readers desire in a memoir, while her whiteness arguably made white readers feel more at ease with her "urban" story. On her blog, Gawker alum Doree Shafrir, makes a number of salient points about Seltzer's race in relationship to the press she received. "We — the New York publishing industry, the media, my blog — wanted to believe Margaret Jones because she was a white girl who had lived with black people. Like a spy! And so she came back and reported to us what life there was really like...I don't see Sarah McGrath [Seltzer's editor] or [New York Times book critic] Michiko Kakutani or me or you buying the books they sell at the Fulton Mall or 125th Street, which are arguably more 'real' than anything Margaret Jones/Seltzer wrote, which is funny because we're supposedly so obsessed with 'reality' and 'authenticity.'"

Shafrir, of course, is not the only blogger to focus on the benefits Seltzer's race afforded her. Undercover Black Man is righteously pissed at Peggy for co-opting black experience, and his ire extends to Sarah McGrath and all the way back to Penguin publishing. "Seltzer's ignorant, tone-deaf editor - Sarah McGrath - owes an apology to the black community of South Los Angeles. McGrath's bosses at the Penguin Group should make some gesture of contrition and good will also. They were probably already counting the money they expected to make... peddling black pain and death to white readers," UBM writes. Adds the LA Times:

"There's a long American tradition of fake ethnic autobiographies that goes back to fake slave narratives in the 1840s," said Laura Browder, associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and author of "Slippery Characters: Ethnic Impersonators and American Identities."

"I think some of the authors of these memoirs have pain and suffering they don't know how to name, so they attach them to something that's universally associated with suffering," like race.

Said black L.A. novelist Gary Phillips, "We know if it were a black girl, that's not exotic, that's just another story from the hood. That's not sexy. There is no movie."

The Lure Of Made-up Memoirs [Los Angeles Times]
Bogus Memoir Sparks Criticism Of Publishing Industry [LA Times]
Tracking The Fallout Of (Another) Literary Fraud [NY Times]
Clearly This Is All I Am Going To Be Thinking About Today [The Doree Chronicles]
Fucking Liar [Undercover Black Man]

Earlier: Female Gang-Banging Memoirist Is More Fiction Than Fact
Susanna Sonnenberg Adds Another Chapter To The Unhinged Mother Canon

For those who haven't read it (and you should!) Karr's Liars Club paints a beautifully-grueling picture of her childhood in East Texas, growing up with a pair of mostly well-meaning alcoholic parents. During the course of the book, Mary's creative and charming (though not exactly warm and fuzzy) mother Charlie suffers two nervous breakdowns, and ends up leaving Mary and her sister Lecia alone in Colorado for weeks at a time while she runs off to Mexico, gets addicted to diet pills, and drinks thousands of Mason jars full of rot gut vodka.

Perhaps the most moving part of The Liar's Club is when Mary and Lecia watch their mother set fire to most of their worldly possessions in a makeshift driveway pyre. Included in the detritus is Mary's rocking horse.

That's my horse getting doused by the upended gas can. I knot my arms in front of my chest and think how I wanted to keep that horse for bouncing. It's supposed to be a baby toy, but some days when Lecia's out, I ride it with springs screeching and close my eyes and picture myself galloping across a wide prairie. Now that horse looks at me blank-eyed and tired. I scan around for a rock or a two-by-four to conk mother on the head with. But Lecia's hands won't let go my shoulders. She could be watching the weather on TV for all the feeling her face shows. I tell her that's my horse Mother's messing with. But she's bored with this complaint. So I let it go. Bye-bye, old Paint, I think to myself, I'm a-leaving Cheyenne

'M' Is For The Mania, Manipulation And Magic [New York Times]
Her Last Death [Amazon]
A Scrappy Little Beast [Salon]

Earlier: Island Of The Blue Dolphins: I'm A Cormorant And I Don't Care

Related:
The Liar's Club: A Memoir [Amazon]

New York Times: Kakutani

Errors of logic are typical of this ill-conceived and poorly executed book — a book that stands as one of the more nonsensical volumes yet published about the aftermath of 9/11.

Feminism, like a trampoline, has made possible this splendid provocation of a book, levitating to keep company with Hunter Thompson's fear and loathing, Leslie Fielder's love and death and Edmund Wilson's patriotic gore.

Throughout the book, Faludi provides stunning and depressing evidence of a concerted effort to silence women and roll back women's rights in the wake of 9/11 and to transform the attack on a U.S. financial symbol where men and women worked side by side into an assault on family and hearth.

Anyone who blames the weird, conflicted state of contemporary womanhood on the cultural fallout of Sept. 11, 2001, isn't just burning her bras but smoking them.

Her thesis may arouse skepticism, but she marshals provocative evidence, documenting such phenomena as a decline of women's bylines in national newspapers and a forty-per-cent drop in federal sex-discrimination prosecutions.

[The Terror Dream] does not mention Joseph Campbell and his "The Hero With a Thousand Faces," or Robert Bly and his "Iron John," or Carl Jung and his theories, but hers is a work of cultural interpretation on the order of theirs.

Faludi proposes that post-9/11 myth making owes its provenance to the frontier narratives emerging from the Indian wars of the 17th and 18th centuries, especially those concerning abductions...It's an original and audacious thesis, but an oddly unsatisfying and problematic one. Her cultural critique is undermined by a lack of comparability.

Earlier: 9/11 Made Our Men Macho Pigs, Or How To Sell A Book About Gender Roles In Wartime

Although this volume quotes Anna Wintour, the editor of 'Vogue', saying such changes mean that 'more people are going to get better fashion' and 'the more people who can have fashion, the better,' the author reaches a more elitist and pessimistic conclusion...[Thomas concludes] 'Luxury has lost its luster.'