Speaking Fiction To Power.

Here is a new non-fiction book which, according to this article, is about the author's "life as a half-white, half-Native American girl growing up in South-Central Los Angeles as a foster child among gang-bangers, running drugs for the Bloods."

The book has received critrical acclaim. The article says The Times called it a “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” and Entertainment Weekly said it was a "powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

So far, so good. Except for a tiny detail the author forgot to mention. The author is actually:

"...all white and grew up in the well-to-do Sherman Oaks section of Los Angeles, in the San Fernando Valley, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. Nor did she graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed."

Oops. But she did graduate from an Episcopal high school. Which doesn't surprise me in the least, given her excuse after the truth came to light:

"“For whatever reason, I was really torn and I thought it was my opportunity to put a voice to people who people don’t listen to,” Ms. Seltzer said. “I was in a position where at one point people said you should speak for us because nobody else is going to let us in to talk. Maybe it’s an ego thing — I don’t know. I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it.”
(emphasis mine)

Now where have we heard that kind of vacuous, self-important, post-modernist twaddle before? Oh, yes. Places like this bastion of Episcopal Newsspeak. (See the third paragraph down.) I will agree with them about one thing - as the arts go, so goes the community. So what does this fakery say about the state of the arts today? And about that "community?" And what does it say about the credibility of all those art "critics" who gave it fawning, un-critical praise?

UPDATE: Good question: Are there now so many half-white, half-Native America, drug-running young girls in gangs who grew up in foster homes that they need someone to speak for them? Please.