March 7, 2008, 12:00am EST

For Phony Memoir's Editor, It's Strike Two

Rate this story
Jeff Bercovici

For a daily reporter, two years often seems more like twenty. So thanks to Gawker for reminding me of something I'd totally forgotten: that I exposed a certain editor's susceptibility to phony memoirs back in March 2006.

That editor is Riverhead's Sarah McGrath, who was responsible for Love & Consequences, a thoroughly fictional account by Margaret Seltzer of the youth she supposedly spent dodging bullets and cooking crack in South Central L.A.

In McGrath's previous job, at Simon & Schuster's Scribner imprint, she bought, for a reported $900,000, a book called How to Wear Black, a purported memoir of life in the fashion stratosphere by a British writer, Emily Davies. Only, as I discovered, Davies hadn't lived the experiences chronicled in her proposal -- she'd cribbed them from various published articles. Simon & Schuster ended up killing the book, and McGrath took a new job only a few weeks later. (My articles dissecting the fraud are in WWD's password-protected archives, but you can read about the deception here.)

Love & Consequences has brought to a fresh boil the always-simmering debate over whether book publishers have an obligation to fact-check memoirs. Publishers have various reasons to oppose it, from the supposedly prohibitive cost to Nan Talese's much-mocked claim that it would be "very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship."

If publishers aren't going to institute fact-checking procedures, then they had better, at a minimum, make sure their bullshit-detectors are in working order. Sarah McGrath's, it's clear, is broken.

SHARE THIS STORY
Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.
http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2008/03/07/for-phony-memoirs-editor-its-strike-two.html
upstart.bizjournals.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2014-42
78572
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZT2OWQZ2NIHZXHPIUWWNYITL5FCZBR44
<urn:uuid:f64a8f2f-6b7f-4b7c-b645-1eafb05bde7d>
2014-10-20T13:04:13Z
65.213.146.70
sha1:JAE7L3PKYYRPZHASCZEMIFKCSOXKOE3T
<urn:uuid:61230159-f7a2-46c6-99c3-acbffc471595>
http://upstart.bizjournals.com/companies/media/2008/03/07/for-phony-memoirs-editor-its-strike-two.html
length
response
<urn:uuid:82c108c2-2496-4859-a06e-7240e3314b9e>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-16-133-185.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2014-42
operator: CommonCrawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web with URLs provided by Blekko for October 2014
publisher: CommonCrawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf