Margaret B. Jones admitted that she lied in her memoir "Love and Consequences: A Memoir for Hope and Survival" and that the basis of her novel was a hoax.
Jones, whose real name is Margaret Smeltzer, said in her book that she was a half-White, half-Native American girl who suffered child abuse while being brought up by foster parents in gritty south-central Los Angeles. She claimed to have kept herself alive by running drugs for members of the Bloods, a notorious street gang in L.A.
On Tuesday, The New York Times revealed Jones' true identity. They reported that Smeltzer was not bi-racial, but indeed White. She also did not grow up in South Central, but in the well-to-do suburb of Sherman Oaks. She attended Campbell Hall School in Los Angeles, one of the cities' most prestigious private schools.
Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin Group USA, immediately announced that it was recalling all copies of the novel and cancelled her scheduled tour, saying that it represented a "personal betrayal" as its staff had been completely taken in by Seltzer's story.
Smeltzer said although she invented much of her memoir, she wanted to tell a story of the forgetten people of the inner-city.
"Maybe it's an ego thing, I don't know," she said. "I just felt that there was good that I could do, and there was no other way that someone would listen to it."
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