Rewinding the Week of 3/24/2008

Misapprehension was the theme of the week. After it appeared that local graffiti artist Skullphone hacked several Clear Channel billboards in different locations, Clear Channel reps told Wired News that the artist may have rented the boards himself or herself. LA hackers and art geeks were not amused. A burglary suspect escaped custody from the hospital days after attempting to evade arrest in a high speed police chase that ended in a massive car crash. Perhaps she's a shape-shifting android from the future.

Officials ignored reports that sharks may be on the prowl along the Southland's coast. The Los Angeles Times learned not to take any document at face value. After the 2nd annual Tech Policy Summit wrapped up in Los Angeles last Friday, attendees were still talking about Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacob's admission that a tech talent drain may enfeeble America and Comcast's collaboration with "frenemy" BitTorrent. Controversy continued in the O.C's Little Saigon community over protests against the Nguoi Viet Daily News. Academics obsessed about obsession at USC. Steve Lopez unveiled a collaborative novel project on LATimes.com. Perhaps they'll let the LAObserved Script Project do the film adaptation. A deadly explosion in Westchester highlighted dangers hidden in our aging underground infrastructure. Scott Gold visited South Los Angeles and found residents still plagued by violence. Heavy hitters from CAA testified about personal privacy procedures at the Anthony Pellicano trial. Entertainment conglomerates labored under the misconception that past business practices were consequence free after a judge awarded "Superman" copyrights back to the creator's heirs and Jack Klugman demanded that NBC Universal exhume its "Quincy, M.E." accounting books.

I went to the Dutton's farewell party last night where it felt like visiting a dear friend in hospice. Some books were on the shelves, but the store was diminished and half-dead, and all her friends had gathered around to say goodbye. In the car after I felt heartsick and I was listening to Regina Spektor's song "Ghost of Corporate Future" and the lyric,

"And people make you nervous
You'd think the world is ending,
And everyobdy's features have somehow started blending
And everying is plastic,
And everyone's sarcastic,
And all your food is frozen,
It needs to be defrosted."

And suddenly I burst into tears. I sobbed and bawled and gulped and drove.

I am over-emotional about this, I know. But see, the world used to brim with places like Dutton’s. Growing up in New York in the 70’s, there were still plenty of places like Dutton’s, not just bookstores, but businesses that were as unique as the people who owned them. People who genuinely cared about the customer and the product and not just the bottom line. Places where you could get your dry cleaning, your meat, your shoes repaired and it was part of your authentic life. At Dutton's you were never a "consumer," you were a "reader" a person with value that exceeded your credit limit.

When I moved to L.A. in 1989 I felt lost along the wide, sunny boulevards with their high-end shopping and industry hangouts, Dutton’s felt like home. I could go and sit on the floor and enter that state of suspended animation where I read without direction, flipping through whatever caught my eye, losing an hour or two to curiosity, letting the sun set behind my back.

For a few years I had a standing shrink appointment across the street from Dutton’s in a medical building with outlandish parking fees. I would illegally park in the Dutton’s lot and jaywalk across San Vicente, get my therapy, and then, purged and sick of myself, I would sit in the stacks for a while. I always spent a little money there, if only to justify the parking. I'd buy a book, or a coffee, or a pretty journal. I wasn’t a writer then, just a reader. I spent a lot of time in the children's section, flipping through the bin of picture books arranged like LP's, replaying the hits from my childhood like “Dandylion,” and “Harry the Dirty Dog.” Dutton's felt like a big "You Are Here" arrow, orienting me in my new life.

And then, yeah, I finally became a writer and had my first reading and reception in the courtyard. Thank God, is all I can say. I am proud to say I have read at Dutton’s and played on the stage of CBGB’s had tea at The Plaza, and an ice cream sundae at Schraft’s and grilled cheeses at the Luncheonette next to the Trans Lux movie theater. All those places now dead and buried under Gaps and Banana Republics and Starbucks. How is it possible that here in my early forties I am suffering from premature nostalgia? Is this a midlife crisis, or the end of the world as I knew it?

I spoke with Diane Leslie, last night, that gentlewoman of books. She was, of course, sad and adrift. Diane reminds me of ladies I knew as a kid in New York: kind, cultured, always dignified and nicely turned-out with a silk scarf and a flower in her hair -- of the world and yet, a little apart from it. My mother would love her. I want her to stay at Dutton’s so I can visit her there, hear more of her generous author introductions, anchor me to something I recognize.

They were selling everything: from store signage to the promotional cut-out of Shaquille O’Neal. I covet that little penguin doorstop that holds open the door of the West Building, but the bidding was already up to $300. I am glad the community is helping Doug Dutton recoup some dough, and I really tried to shop for books, but found I had no appetite for picking the bones.

So I left, and got in the car and blubbered like a little girl. I cried for my own little girls who are growing up in a world where these soulful places get taken for their real estate value. This got mixed in with my anxiety over that big Arctic ice shelf that broke off last week, and it's all part of a death spiral we're caught up in and the future feels so murky and scary and now my children will have to finish their growing-up in a dry, Dutton’s-less world. Maybe I am just hormonal and hysterical.

I got home, tear-stained, and my girls ran to me, asking what was wrong. I told them all about it, and they nodded solemnly and hugged me. They tried to cheer me up. "At least we still have Children’s Book World," they said. Yes, we do. For now.

"You'd think the world was ending,
You'd think the world was ending,
You'd think the world was ending right now.

Well maybe you should just drink a lot less coffee,
And never ever watch the ten o'clock news,
Maybe you should kiss someone nice,
Or lick a rock,
Or both.

The world is everlasting,
Put dirtballs in your pocket,
Put dirtballs in your pocket,
And take off both your shoes.
'Cause people are just people,
people are just people,
People are just people like you."

Anyone who watches the evening news has likely been aware for years that they are either part of the pharmaceutical industry's target market, or outnumbered by that market's members.

Every other commercial during the news hour, or so it seems, promotes some drug or medical treatment, which conditioned me long ago to tune out the warning list near the end.

But this evening I was so struck by what I thought was said in a commercial for the drug Lunesta that I went to the Web site to confirm I'd heard it right:

"Call your doctor right away if after taking Lunesta you walk, drive, eat or engage in other activities while asleep."

*With apologies to Don Henley.

CBS Investigates produced a story in August 2007 about "a common television ad for restless leg syndrome (RLS)" which also included "an unusual side effect: gambling."

Two members of the Los Angeles branch of the Dorothy Parker Society visited the Writers Guild West headquarters on Fairfax a few days after parties settled the 2008 Writers Guild Strike last month. Brian Diedrick and I were on a mission to verify a rumor that the WGA harbored a portrait of Mrs. Parker (as her best friend, Robert Benchley, called her), hidden from public view. Working his boyish charms, Brian obtained an appointment at the The Writers Guild Foundation Shavelson-Webb Library and invited me along

We were there at the behest of the Dorothy Parker Society President , Kevin Kitzpatrick, who longed to add the image to his collection of Parker memorabilia.

Patricia Eliot Tobias, Guild historian, set the record straight for us: the WGA West created a mixed media wall display of women writers that includes Dorothy Parker's photo. When the WGA West moved into its present headquarters in 2000, staffers decided to decorate its entrance with displays commemorating Guild history, including panels focused on the importance of women writers. Ms.Tobias, past WGA West President, Del Reisman, and Susan Golsarry of the Warner Bros. Sign Department collaborated on the artworks.

Photo Credit: Writers Guild of America West

Ms. Tobias offered to show us the works on display in a conference room, called "The Women's Room" by staffers, located on the upper floors of the Guild building.

Huddled in a tiny elevator filled with other Guild staffers, we ascended in rapt silence. Ms. Tobias led us into a wide room with an antechamber where we saw a photo collage honoring the founders of the Screen Writers Guild in 1932-33 (not to be confused with the Screen Writers Guild formed in 1921 as a social organization). We scanned the sepia-toned faces for our dear Mrs. Parker but she wasn't there.

Ms. Tobias explained that while Mrs. Parker played an important role in the Guild's early formation, she was not one of the 10 writers who started the fledgling union. According to The Hollywood Writers' Wars by Nancy Lynn Schwartz and Parker's biographer, Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker hosted several clandestine Guild meetings after studio moguls banned union organizing activities prior to 1938 when a National Labor Relations Board ruling paved the way for screen writers to organize themselves legally.

Our search continued.

We entered a larger conference room filled with picket signs left over from the recent strike. A cute staffer smiled at us with bemusement as he dismantled placards. But this was no time for flirting as I was on a sacred mission.
Brian and I spotted a large exhibit on Frances Marion, a silent film pioneer. Anita Loos, in all her flapper glory, eyed me from a separate wall display to my left.

Where was our Dottie?

We found her on a smaller display board, commemorating several other female screenwriters, in a corner near the room’s entrance. There was Dorothy Parker, front and center, posed as a sexy jazz baby stepping off the train. We paid our respects by snapping numerous photos (see accompanying photo) because we forgot to bring a flask of gin to toast her properly. Brian, Ms. Tobias and I returned to the library where we inspected a 1933 script of "A Star is Born," co-authored by Mrs. Parker along with her husband Alan Campbell and several others. Even better, Ms. Tobias Patty found Mrs. Parker's Guild membership application and shared a copy with us.

Content in the knowledge that we had solved the mystery of Dorothy Parker and the WGA Portrait, we headed home.

Today is the one-year anniversary of the death of our friend Cathy Seipp. I say "our" because she so impacted her core group of friends, of which Matt Welch wrote on this date last year, "[Cathy] deserves all the credit in the world for creating this community of unlike-minded weirdoes around her." Indeed, Cathy had put me in touch with Matt and his wife Emmanuelle Richard three years earlier, when I had some questions about health insurance. Cathy radically disagreed with Matt and Emmanuelle's semi-positive position on socialized medicine (Emmanuelle is from France), a view I shared, and I think she threw us together with the idea that we might talk some sense into each other; that, or give her the opportunity to sit us down as a group and scold us, something we all would have thoroughly enjoyed. Cathy also was my initial liaison to Jackie Danicki; they'd met through blogging; had some face-time in London, face-time I admired and wanted to emulate, and did.

I'd actually met Cathy many years earlier, when I was still reading scripts for a living. I desperately wanted to be a journalist, and so, would type out articles at home, and fax them cold to publications around LA. No one ever answered me, but one.

"This is Catherine Seipp," the woman on the phone said. "I got your article. It's good. Now, what do you want me to do with it?"

Cathy was at Buzz at the time, and I told her, I wanted her to publish it, whereupon she gently but pointedly told me, that's not the way it worked; you sell the idea, and then write it. "This way, you get paid -- or at least get a kill fee."

I didn't know what a kill fee was, but she'd given me a strategy.

Within the year, I was a columnist at Buzz, where Cathy was both a columnist and a contributing writer. She also scared the hell out of me. She had an opinion about everything: the LA Times (which she notoriously skewered each month, under the byline Margo Magee); writing for Hustler (yay); same-sex marriage (nay); the texture of the chicken at our monthly contributers' lunches at Maple Drive. I remember mentioning at one such lunch in 1995 that the magazine was sending Hillary Johnson and me and our two small children to Las Vegas, to write about how the city was becoming kid-friendly.

"That's a sin," Cathy said from across the table. I thought she was kidding. When she repeated it, I knew she was not.

During the next five years, Cathy and I became friends, then good friends. We met for monthly breakfasts at Kokomo at the Farmers Market, a group that included Hillary, Cathy, Amy Alkon, Jill Stewart, Sandra Tsing Loh, Denise Hamilton, Monica Corcoran, Kerry Madden, Emmanuelle, other writers in town for a reading or a story. We called it the Writer Girls breakfast, though I don't think there was any edict about men coming or not coming; I do recall seeing Ross Johnson there once; also, David Rensin and Luke Ford. Though perhaps there was an edict, as I can't imagine Cathy not having one.

To say Cathy was the center of this group is to state the obvious; she was the one who sent the email invites, to which she expected an RSVP. I remember more than once someone showing up who had not, and Cathy disapprovingly raising her eyebrows, and then gently if pointedly remarking that it really is better if you RSVP, so that we know how many tables we need. Really, it's out of courtesy for the servers.

Cathy and I knew each other as colleagues, as friends; as mothers. We both had daughters born in 1989, and before I met my husband in 1997, had for the most part raised them ourselves, on what we earned as freelancers. We didn't need to beat this point, but a point it was. I don't know if it contributed to my being one of the handful of writer girls whom Amy called, in June of 2002, to say Cathy had lung cancer.

"She only wants a few people to know," Amy told me, and that the surgery would be at Cedars. I called Cathy. She told me, she'd found out really as a fluke: she had asthma, and had not been able to shake a cough, and the doctor had decided to do a chest x-ray, which he looked at and then, promptly walked her down the hall to oncology. I do recall Cathy telling me, "The doctor said, if the surgery takes 30 minutes, it means he couldn't get it. If it takes an hour, he could."

Cathy said that when she came out of the anesthesia, she'd asked the nurse, "How long did it take?"

"Forty-five minutes," the nurse told her.

"Which you can imagine, was very frustrating." This was Cathy, the day after surgery, in her hospital bed, surrounded by her family. I'd walked into the room holding a poundcake, whereupon Cathy said, "That's so kind of you, and Nancy, do you remember my mother?"

Picture this scene: a room full of shellshocked people who know the surgeon could not get the cancer; that the prognosis is bad. And Cathy, making introductions, making sure the older folks have seats, sending someone down the hall for ice. Her composure was surreal. I think of it often, especially when I am being a weakling. I think of Hillary walking in with the gift of a peignoir, so that Cathy might look beautiful as she convelesced, and Cathy -- still covered in mecurichrome or whatever that yellow stuff is they paint on you during surgery -- holding it up to her chest, commenting on how pretty it was, and how thoughtful. I think of Jill Stewart, with Cathy when she was wheeled to her room post-surgery, telling the nurse, "You need to get her some painkillers," and when the nurses dillydallied, Jill charging after them down the hall, saying, "YOU NEED TO GET HER PAINKILLERS, NOW!"

And how do I know this story? Because Cathy told it to me; she told all the cancer stories; the funny ones, the terrible ones. Cancer was now part of the narrative, and we were not going to be namby-pamby about it; we were not going to wear pink ribbons and tiptoe around. As she famously announced at a party, “I just want to let everyone know having cancer hasn’t made me a better person.”

I have written previously about this woman's courage.

I think of her rather as a dance mistress in this. Her friends who knew about the cancer reacted with varying degrees of emotional spasticity: to ask or not to ask about the new chemo? Is bringing over more food annoying or nice? Oh my god, Maia? How much crying is not okay? But whether in person or psychically, one sensed Cathy clapping her hands, and saying, "None of this. We are not going to freak out; we are not going to lie on the floor and throw a tantrum. We are going to do this dance this way."

And we did. We nearly always did what Cathy wanted us to do.

This became a difficult toward the end of her life. She was very sick; some of us questioned the rationality of continuing treatment -- she was on her third round of chemo, plus radiation to shrink the tumors simply so she would not be in such unbearable pain. Maybe we should look into a visiting nurse? Hospice? But Cathy did not want that, and as Sandra so wisely said, who were we to question Cathy on decisions concerning Cathy? And so Amy took her to chemo, as did Emmanuelle, who also created a Google schedule called Team Cathy, so that people could drive, bring food, pick up Maia from the train. If you die in your 40s, and if you were, as Cathy was, the centerpiece of your group, you are surrounded by robust, capable people who are going to do everything they can to save your life, though we all knew, there would be no saving. There would only be attempts at comfort. I flew in from Portland for a week last Feburary to be with Cathy, to basically drink milkshakes with her and dish the dirt and take naps. Jackie came from London the following week and did the same.

In the weeks leading to Cathy's death, it was as though we -- the weirdoes, the writer girls, Cathy's myriad other friends, and the masses teeming over at Cathy's World, a veritable clusterfuck of folks posting 200, 300, 968 comments on whatever Mistress Cathy wrote -- became a buzzing hive. Thouands of phone calls and emails and blog posts passed in the days leading up to her death. Maybe this is the way it always is, but I -- and many of Cathy's friends, most of us in our 30s and 40s -- had not experienced the protracted death of a friend; we did not know how to sit on our hands; we had to keep trying, just as Cathy was.

On March 21 2007, just after 2 pm, I was at the public library when my cell phone rang. It was Emmanuelle, the third time we'd spoken that day, this time to tell me, Cathy had died. I sank down in a nook between the wall and a bookcase; asked Emmanuelle if she were okay; she said yes, but there were still things that needed to be done. Of course.

These things included to continue talking about Cathy, a conversation that reached such a din by the next day, Technorati listed "Cathy Seipp" as its #1 search, a fact we cheered and which certainly Cathy would have loved, though I also imagine her saying, "Well, yes."

Sandra was recently in Portland, and we spent time together, including a few hours at Ristretto talking about work, kids, and of course, Cathy. Sandra was at the hospital during the days preceding Cathy's death, a time that was -- no suprise -- attended, with various degrees of decorum, by the unlike-minded weirdoes and others. There are few people in the world who can tell a story like Sandra; the grand accents; the sweeping mannerisms; the spot-on caricatures were all there, and as I sat there listening, I realized, I had cried, but I was also laughing. And you might think, what a terrible thing, laughing at the narrative of your friend's death. And maybe it is a terrible thing, but it didn't feel terrible; it felt like a continuation of Cathy, and in truth I think she would only want; would most certainly demand that we continue the narration of her life, which includes her death.

I spoke yesterday to Amy, who said, "I find myself mentioning her as often as I can. I just want her here, and for people to know about her." Me, too.

Carolyn Kozo Cole really loves photographs. They cover every inch of wall in her office on the bottom level of the downtown Central Library. The library's photo collection curator, she also loves Los Angeles history. And when she vets new volunteers to help with projects, she looks for people who feel as she does. The least successful volunteer, Cole says politely, only wants to look at the photographs. The best is a Los Angeles history buff who also happens to be a fan of photography.

I was more of the former than the latter, and gave it up after a half-dozen sessions. But Cole currently has several of the good kind helping to organize and research her newest project — poring through thousands of photos in the collection looking for gems that reveal the industrial past of Los Angeles, then — the hard but crucial part — digging up the stories behind the images. Two key volunteers on the Industrial L.A. project are mystery writer John Shannon, who grew up in San Pedro and is working with images of the port area, and Tom Dinger, a third generation engineer for Southern Pacific. He's all about the train photos.

The images span the 1920's through the 1970's, when Los Angeles was at its height as an industrial center. There are photos of tire plants and factories turning out everything from airplanes, ceramic dishes and macaroni to pillows, beer and perfume. One series of photos gives a 1926 glimpse of Ernest Batchelder and the kilns for his iconic fireplace tiles. In another, women in demure bonnets label jars of honey. The photographs come mainly from the Los Angeles Public Library's Security Pacific National Bank and Herald Examiner collections, and some showed up in the stacks from other sources. The photographers range from newspaper staffers to chamber of commerce free-lancers.

Cole felt a visual survey of the industries of Los Angeles would provide the historical record of "a beautiful subject." She has a particular fondness for an image that makes art of the merchandise at the Duracraft Casket & Urn Factory in Culver City. Her goal is to get as many of the photographs as possible up on the LAPL website, and mount a public exhibit in 2009. In the meantime, she could use a few more diligent volunteers. Cole can be reached by by email or at the library.

Photo of the L.A. Knitting Co., date unknown: LAPL / Security Pacific collection
Photo of 38-ply tire at Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, South Gate, 1964: LAPL / Herald Examiner collection

Yesterday, local history buffs and surfing enthusiasts gathered at Calvary Baptist Church in Santa Monica for a presentation on the history of the "Ink Well," a segregated beach in Santa Monica popular with African American Angelenos during the first half of the 20th century. Located at Bay Street and Ocean Front Walk, steps from the Casa Del Mar Hotel, the Ink Well served as the home base for pioneering African American surfer, Nick Gabaldon.

The Santa Monica Conservancy and Calvary Baptist Church co-hosted the "African Americans and the Beach" program to celebrate the dedication of a commemorative plaque to honor Nick's accomplishments and officially recognize the area's significance. The City of Santa Monica unveiled the plaque in early February after surfer Rhonda Harper asked the Santa Monica City Council to recognize the historical importance of the site in 2006.

On Sunday, historian Alison Rose Jefferson, who authored the text on the commemorative plaque, shared her research about the black community that had occupied the neighborhoods off Pico between 14th and 24th Streets since the early 1900s and the development of seaside resorts and entertainment venues catering to blacks prior to the civil rights era. Filmmaker Portia Scott Hicks displayed clips from her film, Soul On a Wave, documenting the story of Nick Gabaldon and other black surfers.

African American parishioners of Philips Chapel CME established the custom of heading down to the beach near 4th and Pico after services for picnics and recreational activities. After enduring several incidents of racial tension between black beach goers and the police in whites-only spots at beaches in Manhattan Beach and Huntington Beach, the black community found a way to congregate unmolested at a polluted, undesirable area, near an an abandoned swimming pool, that no one wanted at the time.

As racial segregation in L.A. increased, Ink Well Beach became one of the few places left for blacks to enjoy the shoreline. Blacks from all over the city gathered at the beach front between Bay Street and Bicknell Street. Until the late 20s, most black Angelenos relaxed at the region's first black beach resort in Manhattan Beach. Charles and Willa Bruce established an inn and dance halls on the beach in 1912 and that stretch of sand became known as "Bruce's Beach." Manhattan Beach politicians evicted the business and surrounding African American neighborhood, claiming the land for a public park via eminent domain. The spot remained vacant for 30 years. Last year, Manhattan Beach renamed Ocean Front Park Bruce's Beach Park in acknowledgment of the shameful incident.

It wasn't all blood, sweat and tears back then. Black Angelenos found ways to enjoy themselves, despite the indignities and hardships, and frequented black-owned bath houses and dance halls such as La Bonita Bath House and Cafe at Pico and Main. Ms. Jefferson illustrated her talk with informal snapshots of Afro Angelenos at play through the years. They looked so carefree in their old-fashioned swimsuits, squinting into the sun and laughing with their friends. Portia Scott Hicks shared lots of photos of Santa Monica resident, Nick Gabaldon, surfing and enjoying his friends on the beach. Nick taught himself to surf and was embraced by the surf legends riding the waves in Malibu. Tragically, Nick died in a surfing accident in Malibu in 1951.

I left the event with greater insight that I could apply to my own memories. Growing up, every summer my family joined another African American family at a Manhattan Beach house owned by their grandparents since the turn of the century. Aware of Manhattan Beach's segregated past, I could never figure out how my friends obtained the property. Thanks to Ms. Jefferson's research, I now surmise that our summer house may have been part of the Bruce's Beach neighborhood.

During the Q&A following the lecture, I learned that the term the "Ink Well" started as a pejorative name for areas in the US — like the famed Inkwell Beach in Oak Bluffs neighborhood on Martha's Vineyard — frequented by blacks that the black community adopted and transformed for their own purposes.

It's painful to listen to tales of injustice during the Jim Crow era, but I am grateful to learn more about our city's past. We've erased so much of our past selves from the Southern California landscape that historic markers like the Ink Well plaque are the only means for us to access memories that reveal how far we've come and remind us of how far we have to go.

As the writer Ellen Gilchrist once said, the truth has a biological urge to come out. In the case of Margaret Seltzer and her fake memoir, "Love and Consequences," she has been excoriated by a cast of thousands for making up an identity, an elaborate story that goes with it, selling it, and reaping the benefits. I'm not writing this to say that she did otherwise, but to suggest that something else is afoot here, something way beyond hoodwinking the publishing industry.

It all has to do with the fact the her sister blew the whistle. Clearly it could have been any number of people at some point - old classmates, teachers, enemies and so on. But because it was her sister who called the publisher, I would say that a Seltzer family disaster - perhaps the Seltzer family disaster - has now been stopped. Why her sister called we do not know, other than she was preventing a lie from continuing. But perhaps she was weary of living with a lifetime of lies. Perhaps she or other family members had tried to stop Margaret before. Perhaps she resented Margaret and when the opportunity presented itself on such a large scale, she was compelled to react. Perhaps Margaret had been trying desperately to please her parents, and prevaricating was the only thing that worked. Perhaps Margaret comes from a family of compulsive liars, except for the sister.

My instinct is that what has occurred is a sister's "intervention," to use the tired rehab term, whether or not she realized that was what she was doing when she picked up the phone and dialed the NY version of Fleet Street.* The result is a scandal playing out on the national stage, focusing attention on the publishing industry's mania for memoirs. There's really no way to prevent false memoirs from being published (yes, fact-checking might have headed this one off at the pass, but there will be others and there have been others, some of which have been penned by well-known writers, and rank as classic literary works, in other eras, having been praised for their artistry). But peel off the layers of the current deception and you are left with a harsh truth that has been forced out and a family looking at itself in the mirror.

Sounds like an epic novel to me. But of course, as the saying goes, you can't make this stuff up. And you wouldn't get a decent book deal if you did. But clearly there is fuel for the sister's own memoir, "How I Saved My Family by Outing My Sister as a Literary Fraud." Now whether or not this is ever written down or published is beside the point, for in truth there is healing and with this new twist in the Seltzer family saga, they may be on their way.

*A reader has contacted me and pointed out that my Fleet Street reference is inaccurate, since Seltzer's sister phoned Riverhead, the publishing company, and not newspapers. She's right, but I was using the reference loosely, to imply that the publishing world has tabloid-like tendencies. Apologies for any confusion.

When I moved from New York to Los Angeles, the man I moved here for affixed a pin to his cap that read, “WE DON’T CARE HOW THEY DO IT IN NEW YORK.” Evidently, he’d had enough of what I considered my unassailable rightness. As someone who spent her first 24 years in New York City, I assumed I knew everything: how to cross the street, what pizza is supposed to taste like, the worth of anything worth knowing, and wasn’t my boyfriend fortunate I’d shown up to save him from his ignorance. The pin was his response.

The ensuing years in Los Angeles taught me there is no one more provincial than a native New Yorker, a point driven home in 2001, when I cruised the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books with my editor from St. Martin’s Press, a stylish, pregnant Manhattanite who, as we passed the hundreds of book-booths snaking the UCLA campus, with some perplexity commented, “I had no idea people in Los Angeles read so many books.” It seemed to trouble her, vaguely, and I knew I’d become at least a quasi-Angeleno when I needed to stop myself from replying, “Why, yes, the Wells Fargo wagon drops them off with the provisions, and have you heard of this one called The Good Earth?”

And so, I am taking some not small glee in the tsunami-like fallout over "Love and Consequences," the latest faked memoir by one Peggy Seltzer – a white girl raised by her family in Sherman Oaks and graduate of the private school Campbell Hall – who published under the name Margaret B. Jones, a half Native-American, half-white girl fostered out at age five, to a black family in gang-infested South Central Los Angeles.

I read the review of this book last week in the New York Times, and within an hour, emailed my editor at the LA Weekly:

I know I've been in the trenches with Laura Albert but:

· Signs of sexual abuse discovered when she arrives at school with blood on her panties?
· Moves into South-Central with a foster mother named Big Mom?
· Grows up amidst and is schooled by the Bloods but “finds love with, of all men, a Crip,” with whom she lives in a small Oregon town?
· One of her many friends in prison writes her: “So few of us will ever get the chance to see what it's like outside LA... be our eyes”? (!!!)

Has Jones at all been on your radar?

This last, because Jones would have been on his radar. Had this girl fought her way up and out through her writing, someone with his or her eye on the book scene in Los Angeles would have heard about her, at a party, a conference, via a tip from a writer; the newspaper. But there’d been nothing, and my editor agreed, it sounded a lot like Navahoax.

The book, based on the review by Michiku Kakutani, strained all credibility; the characters, dialogue, heartbreaks and denouement were stereotypical to the point of cartoonish. It eluded me how Kakutani could characterize the work as, “humane and deeply effecting.” Reading a follow-up piece in the Times, by Mimi Read, who with a straight face quoted Jones as saying, “One of the first things I did once I started making drug money was to buy a burial plot,” I thought, how is it possible that a New York Times reporter believes this?

When the book was exposed, nearly in real time, as a hoax, I figured out at least one of the reasons why those in New York who’d bought and published and lauded "Love and Consequences" were able to do so with a clear-ish conscience: the stories did not sound made-up to them. To a New Yorker, black foster mothers in South Central are, naturally, called Big Mom. Little girls who’ve been sexually abused show up with blood on their panties. And do 13-year-olds buy their own burial plots? In LA, they do. And if those pesky things called “facts” couldn’t be checked, it’s not their fault, but the fault of Jones’s family members and friends all being dead or in prison. Duh.

Of course, we’re now seeing the back peddling, the second-guessing; the mea culpas. The book’s editor, Sarah McGrath, did not in three years of working on the book meet Seltzer. The book’s literary agent, Faye Bender, was quoted this week as saying, “There was no reason to doubt [Seltzer], ever.” This, though Seltzer lied about her race, family, education; about life, death, sexual abuse, guns, and drugs. Ira Silverberg, the agent who represents the under-fire Ishmael Beah and who also represented JT LeRoy, whom he never met (but who told me he would not have represented Laura Albert, whom he did meet, “because I find her unpleasant”), feels, “It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail.”

And Nan A. Talese, who published the sine qua non of the genre, James Frey’s "A Million Little Pieces," doesn’t like the idea of double-checking an author. “I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book,” she told the Times. “It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.”

Funny, I’ve never been insulted when asked by an editor to check facts, but anyway, this is not really about fact checking; I don’t personally care if someone writes he ate a Pink’s hot dog with grilled onions in March, when actually it was a chili dog in May. What I care about is that the writer – of fiction or memoir – is telling the truth as best he or she can, and I think this is what editors care about, too, or should. Those in New York who do, in fact, wield so much influence; who have such a vast range of culture to choose from and to disseminate, need to have the guts and aptitude to admit, they might not know enough about a subject or region to know whether what they’re reading is the truth, and then, summon the curiosity to find out.