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

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.