Move over James Frey, there?s a new fake memoirist in town

Margaret B. Jones and her daughter in Eugene, Oregon
People who tell elaborate lies fascinate me. I can't lie to save my life and am hard pressed to even fib about small matters. So when someone pulls off a large scale scam in front of the media, like James Frey or Jason Blair, I'm oddly impressed at their audacity and pleased that they were eventually exposed.

Author Margaret B. Jones wrote a "memoir" which was just published by a division of Penguin books. In the critically acclaimed book, "Love and Consequences," she waxed poetic about her supposed hard knock childhood in South LA. She claims to be a 1/2 Native American orphan who was raised by an African-American foster mother nicknamed "Big Momma," to have lost one of her foster brothers to gang violence, and to have sold drugs as a teen in order to afford the latest Nikes.

The NY Times profiled Jones in a glowing piece published on Sunday, interviewing the author at her home in Eugene, Oregon. Jones made riveting claims in her interview including the idiotic statement that her all-white daughter, now eight, "was the first white baby I ever saw" and that she thought she looked "sickly" because of her color. She was also careful to mention that her baby's father "was the first white guy I ever dated."

33 year-old Jones told the Times that "One of the first things I did once I started making drug money [as a teen] was to buy a burial plot," and that "The reason I wanted to write the book is that all the time, people would say to me, you’re not what I imagine someone from South L.A. would be like."

Jones is suprisingly not from South L.A., nor did she have a life anything like she claims in her book. Her sister called her publisher after reading that piece and revealed that her sister's real name is Margaret Seltzer, and that she grew up with both biological parents in affluent Sherman Oaks and graduated from a private high school. She also never went to college in Oregon as she claims. Jones' publishers, Riverhead Books, a division of Penguin, have recalled all of the copies of the book and canceled her book tour, which was about to start.

As for why she would fabricate her memoirs, Jones offered the following lame excuse to the NY Times in a mea culpa piece today, "I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have."

If you read her interview from over the weekend, it offers plenty of laughable lies she told, including showing a picture of a young man and saying "This is my brother who’s dead, back when he was in juvie."

You can even picture her rubbing her hands together as she speculates what she would do with the money from a potential film deal, saying "I’d probably buy a building in the ’hood in L.A. and open a community center and some boxing rings."

It's a shame that this woman was exposed so soon. It's clear she would have kept on lying through her teeth and that Oprah would have lauded her rags to literary riches story.