No use crying ...

Mopping up Margaret "Peggy" B Jones Selzer week:

First, check out five takes here at the L.A. Times on Margaret B. Jones' phony memoir, from Rubén Martínez ("Why We Fall For Fakes"), Rita Williams ("Literary Wannabes"),Samantha Dunn ("Why You Should Be Enraged By Literary Liars"), Tim Rutten ("The Lure of Made-Up Memoirs") and Denise Hamilton ("An Antidote to the Margaret B. Joneses").

Second, here's a tidbit from the Q&A that Penguin Books did with Jones (who admitted last week that her real name is Margaret "Peggy" SeltzerÖ ) about a scene that always made her -- and her editor -- cry:

Q: What was the scene that affected both of you so much?

A: It was the scene in which my little sisters and I were walking home from the Korean grocery store and Nishia dropped a carton of milk. It burst open and the milk streamed into the gutter. She burst into tears, begging me not to be mad as she stooped down trying to scrape it all back into the broken carton. I told her I wasn’t mad. But I was. That was a half-gallon of milk wasted and two dollars gone. Even now, as an adult, just thinking about that—thinking about the choices you were given as a child that weren’t kid choices—makes me want to cry.

Crying over spilled milk? Did no one noticed that at its heart, this weeper is nothing more than an overworked cliché? Really?

Third, lit blogger Ron Hogan, who has been nobly anti-pile-on, writes that Jones/Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, was doing her job, picking up a story that was apparently so compelling that it also fooled a Pulitzer-grade book critic like the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani, who said on Feb. 28,"Ms. Jones has done an amazing job of conjuring up her old neighborhood," thanks to "a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."

To which I would respond (heck, I am responding) that part of the problem is that Kakutani's feel for the truth of South L.A.'s "social rituals and routines" seems inevitably formed by the same pop culture hand-me-downs from which Jones/Seltzer seems to have crafted her book.

Finally, if you want to get with Madd Ronald, the gang member whose message about Peggy appeared on the now-defunct International Brother/SisterHood website, he's on MySpace.

Carolyn Kellogg

photo by Eduardo Sciammarella via flickr

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[MADD RONALD]

I AM O/G MADD RONALD.
ANYONE WISHING TO GET IN TOUCH WITH ME CAN REACH ME @ ronr20s@aol.com.
ANY QUESTIONS CAN BE ANSWERED WHEN YOU REACH OUT TO ME.