The XX Factor: What women really think.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Memoirs

I'm having a hard time summoning a lot of outrage over the story of Herman Rosenblat, the Holocaust survivor who reimagined his stay in a subcamp of Buchenwald. In his (now canceled) and unfortunately subtitled memoir, Angel at the Fence: The True Story of a Love that Survived, he told the beautiful lie that a girl who lived near the camp had kept him alive by chucking apples over the fence to him. He'd already gone on Oprah and told the world that years later, in Coney Island, he and the girl had improbably met again, on a blind date, and had married. But does that really make Rosenblat another Margaret Seltzer? (She's the author of Love and Consequences, the 100 percent trumped-up "memoir'' in which, instead of growing up white and well-off in the San Fernando Valley, she's a half-Native American foster child gang-banger in South Central. Details!) Or does Rosenblat's fabulism put him on a moral par with James Frey, whose real adventures in addiction and rehab were wildly improved upon for his memoir-ish A Million Little Pieces? No and no. I guess there is a sense in which every lie is pathological. But there is also a pretty wide chasm between an addict lying to sell books, and a camp survivor lying, according to the statement released through his agent, "to bring happiness to people, to remind them not to hate, but to love and tolerate all people. I brought good feelings to a lot of people and I brought hope to many. My motivation was to make good in this world. In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream."

You know how every time John McCain did something crappy—like oh, say, abandon the wife who waited for him the whole time he was a POW—we said, Hey, the man was in a box for five years; he's allowed! Why would the McCain Rule not apply to poor Herman Rosenblat? Of course passing fiction off as reality is wrong. And I get why Holocaust scholars are "fiercely on guard against fabrication of memories because they taint the truth ... and raise doubts about the millions who were killed or brutalized.'' But aren't there cases in which embroidering on the truth might not be a sign of insanity so much as the only guard against it?   

As Rosenblat's tale is still going to be made into a movie, maybe this is just another case, as per Ben Crair, of America's weird insistence on prettying up the Holocaust by focusing on resistance fighters or righteous Gentiles or especially inspirational survivors. I don't see, though, that this emphasis is either a peculiarly American phenomenon—ever been to France?—or particular to our treatment of the Holocaust. Isn't that what Hollywood does? Could be I am just reacting to Crair's jerky line about "the most wonderful season of the year.'' But while it's true that Schindler's List is no Shoah, making the topic accessible to the general public is no crime, either, is it?

Margaret Seltzer and Vanishing Odds

A guest post from David Plotz, who writes:

That was a great post, Melonyce. It got me thinking about why my immediate reaction was so skeptical, based on what little I knew about the book. Was it just some reflexive racism of the sort you describe—no way a white kid gets sent to a poor black foster family? Or was it something else? And I haven’t really settled it in my own mind.

I think the answer is that I did a quick mental calculation that went something like this: How many white kids get placed in black foster families? How often do those foster families happen to be right in the middle of gangland, USA? What are the chances that that kid then grows up to be a gang girl and gang mascot who witnesses murders, etc.? And what are the chances that she then makes it entirely out of gangworld? And what are the chances she then turns out to be a really good writer? And what are the chances she happens to get her writing into the hands of a swanky New York publishing house? I think the result of that mental calculation was the notion that there was a small chance that each one of these things could be true but an infinintessimally small chance that they all could be true.

The Color of Hopelessness

Guess I’m a rube, too, Hanna. When David started the e-mail thread at Slate calling BS on Seltzer’s “memoir,” I had the sneaking suspicion that folks were quick to denounce the book’s veracity out of the notion that a white girl couldn’t possibly be raised in a black foster family or have experienced the stuff that Margaret Seltzer said she had. No doubt David and others saw fakery in aspects of the story aside from her skin color. I, too, thought she was playing up the lingo and lifestyle for effect—the gangster recuperating from a gunshot wound on her couch was a bit much, and the pit-bull tattoo, well. Still, that didn’t prove that the writer hadn’t spent her adolescence in South Central running drugs for thugs. Assuming that a white girl wouldn’t be placed in an inner-city neighborhood with a black foster family is folly. My black aunt took in plenty of white kids, from toddlers to teens, during many years as a foster mother. There's a thorny presumptuousness behind the mind-set of how could a white kid possibly get stuck in such a hopeless life! In reality, a white girl could be placed in a housing project in Compton or a trailer park in Riverside. She could wind up slinging crack or meth. Both scenarios are feasible, even if they don’t apply to Margaret, and hopelessness knows no skin color.

On Beyond Plagiarism

Here is an entry in the category of why my husband is better than your husband. Since the minute he read the review of Love and Consequences, the book by a white girl (Margaret Jones) raised in South Central by a black foster mother, "Big Mom," David has insisted it must be made up. I meanwhile insisted that he was just being cynical, world-weary, crass. I have lately been spending lots of time in  poor, run-down apartment complexes and was affected by the idea of a gang-banger who could live to write about it. So much so that a couple of days ago I bought the book. You know where this is headed. I was literally just settling in tonight to crack open the book when I hear David running triumphantly up the stairs. Indeed, he was right. The New York Times reports that the entire thing is made up. Every bit of it. Apparently her sister called the publisher when she read about the book and saw a photo of the author, whose real name is Margaret Seltzer. The chick grew up in the San Fernando Valley, with her own family. She went to a private Episcopal school. In the Times story, she still seems, queerly, to defend herself, insisting she was giving a voice to the voiceless. The voiceless? Has she not seen American Gangster, or listened to any rap music? "Maybe, it was an ego thing," she tells the Times. Yeah, maybe.