Fabricating Memoirs

First it was A Million Little Pieces. Now, just two years later, a second fake memoir has fooled a major American publisher. Will there be any changes? Love and Consequences purported to be the memoir of a half-white, half-Native-American girl, who grew up in a black foster family in South Central Los Angeles. Margaret B. Jones supposedly carried illegal guns and sold rugs for the gang called the Bloods. But none of that really happened and Jones turned out to be Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in a comfortable suburb in the San Fernando Valley. Rachael Donadio is a writer and editor at the New York Times Books Review.