Margaret Seltzer: I'm Too Tired To Say More Than This

As I've been saying in the inboxes, that Golliwog stuff gives me a pass for a few months. I am not required to do anything that involves effort for a while, DAMMIT. But I know two people whose eloquent fury is glorious to behold, and should they decide to give me the okay to cut/paste here, I shall do so. Just so you know, they probably won't because they haven't in the past. This might sound weird to some, but the vast majority of my close friends do not have blogs. I was the first of the group to go out with one, and it took me quite a while to get comfy with the idea. We're old. We don't early adopt to anything. We also don't think all our business needs to be out in the street.

Anywho, steps to take over the course of three years:

1. Get a map.
2. Notice there's no "Stockyard" street near Crenshaw, or anywhere else in Los Angeles.
3. There's no Starbucks on that non-existent street, either.
4. Once you notice no "Stockyard" & Crenshaw exists, or a Starbucks located there, note where the Starbucks are located along Crenshaw.
5. Then maybe you'll notice that they're all relatively new, as in the last 3 or 4 years. There's one located close to a street that sounds like "Stockyard," but it opened less than two years ago.  (I killed the old site, so I can't link you to the related entry about the Hollywood Bowl. That exists only on my archive, now.)
6. Note the timeline of when the author claimed she wrote the book at the alleged Starbucks. That timeline doesn't work.
7. Try to recall when was the last time there was evidence any of the traditional gangs - Bloods/Crips/M-13/en Side Wah Ching  or any other - were racially integrated. Draw a blank. These types of gangs racially integrate *only* in Hollywood depictions.
8. Try to remember the last time members of a traditional gang would 1: ask a female to "speak for them" or 2: ask a person who had a hefty dose of white in them to "speak for them." Draw a blank. Call around to make sure it's not just you...because you've been busy, maybe you missed something. Keep asking around even as everyone laughs hysterically at the very idea.

When the first story hit the NYT, those are the things that me & my circle picked up on immediately. But then again, we're actual black people who live in South LA and have a clue informed by life instead of television and movies.

McGrath had *three years* on this book and with this person. If her NYC-myopic, culturally ignorant self had simply picked up a map at some point, *everything* else would have started falling apart. I mean, if your cluelessness is such that you don't  even think to question the thought that 'native american/white woman' does not equal full embrace from the Bloods? You need a map.   

Here's how Rommelmann put it: To a New Yorker, black foster mothers in South Central are, naturally, called Big Mom. Little girls who’ve been sexually abused show up with blood on their panties. And do 13-year-olds buy their own burial plots? In LA, they do. And if those pesky things called “facts” couldn’t be checked, it’s not their fault, but the fault of Jones’s family members and friends all being dead or in prison. Duh.

The author isn't the only one who needs to burn, here.  Author, editor, agent. I'll give the publisher a partial pass. But post-James Frey, how profoundly lacking in judgment do you have to be to edit a memoir by someone you have never met and didn't bother to fact check???? Someone with that level of monumental lack should be shifted from handling memoir authors to doing the fiction ones, where this book would be fine, provided you could build a story line strong enough to get people like Moi past the obvious errors. True gangbangers asking a woman lacking even the One Drop Rule to be their voice. ahahahahaha You can get that past the NPR listening, NYT/New Yorker reading casually liberal white audience ensconced in their homogeneous universes, but the rest of us are just going to point and laugh. Unless your writing is powerful enough to pull it off.

As one person said, the story here is really Seltzer's biological family. A few of them knew she was writing a book, none of them gave a fuck enough about her to even bother to look at it while it was in progress.*** (Maybe she hid it from them? I would like to think she hid it from them, as that would indicate she's not a complete idiot.) But then she's stupid enough to submit to an interview with the NYT, complete with a gallery of photos! And so her sister sees it and dimes her out to the world. Yeah. That family dynamic? That's your book.

Also, what memo did I miss that explains why Fiction is now frowned upon among the editorial gatekeepers in NYC? Fiction has changed the world. Upton Sinclair. Charles Dickens. They come to mind at this moment. There are tons more. Why don't authors like this, and editors like this, and agents like this JUST DO FICTION?   The glory of fiction is you can do anything you want and speak for whomever you want (regardless of if they asked you to do so) provided you pull it off.

*** The Official Mom of BGF Central doesn't actually like what her child has chosen to do with her abilities. But she will occasionally read some of it and then make alarmed queries along the lines of 'are you happy? or 'when's the last time you went to church?'  or 'it's too upsetting to read the whole thing' or 'why are you so mean to those people' and it is all we can do not to fall over laughing. We  must not fall over laughing where she can notice because that woman can take us out. There's a reason she's one of the few people on the planet to whom we  Submit.