American memoir hoax: the sequel

As the US publishing world reels from the latest literary hoax - Margaret Seltzer's fabricated memoir Love and Consequences - it turns out this is not the first time the book’s editor, Sarah McGrath of Riverhead, has been hoodwinked. In 2006, McGrath championed fashion writer Emily Davies's memoir How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Front-line which purportedly detailed Davies's four years as a fashion writer for the London Times. It was set to expose "a surreal, luxurious and terrifying world of lavish gifts, fashionably skeletal obsessives and couture warfare".

McGrath bought the book in a rumoured $900,000 deal for Simon & Schuster's Scribner division. But the deal was cancelled after Women's Wear Daily reported that Davies had not only fabricated her memories of life on the Times but had plagiarised various writers in putting together her 79-page proposal. Scribner quickly cancelled Davies's contract before the book - "a cross between The Devil Wears Prada and How to Lose Friends and Alienate People” - was published.

McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles ('Chip') McGrath, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review and sister of the New Yorker's Ben McGrath, has not been available for comment on How to Wear Black. She has said of being duped by Seltzer, after spending three years working with her on Love & Consequences: "There's a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one."

Meanwhile, more details are surfacing of the lengths Seltzer went to in order to deceive both her publishers and the public that she was brought up on the mean streets of LA. (As reported here yesterday, she actually enjoyed the middle-class comforts of an upbringing in the San Fernando Valley). She told her publishers she wanted to use the pseudonym Margaret B Jones because it was the name she was known by in the gang world. She introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a woman posing as her foster sister. Most serious, it now appears she invented a non-profit 'gang truce' organisation she called the International Brother/SisterHood which she told interviewers she had started in LA to help young people move away from gang life. Subsequent inquiries with the tax authorities have shown the organisation to be bogus.

While many are calling for stricter fact-checking within the publishing industry, Nan A Talese, who published the famously discredited memoir by James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, told the New York Times yesterday: "I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book. It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship."