You Wanna Move That Case of Books From Biography over to Fiction? Yeah, right over there...thanks

Sister blew whistle on Margaret B. Jones, who said she was a foster child in South L.A., but really grew up with family in Sherman Oaks.

By Bob Pool and Rebecca Trounson, Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

March 4, 2008

The gripping memoir of "Margaret B. Jones" received critical raves. It turns out it should have been reviewed as fiction.

The author of "Love and Consequences," a critically acclaimed autobiography about growing up among gangbangers in South Los Angeles, acknowledged Monday that she made up everything in her just-published book.

"Jones" is actually Margaret Seltzer. Instead of being a half-white, half-Native American who grew up in a foster home and once sold drugs for the Bloods street gang, she is a white woman who was raised with her biological family in Sherman Oaks and graduated from Campbell Hall, an exclusive private school in the San Fernando Valley.

"and so, down the road behind the hog farm where the old man was sucking on the corn cob pipe with his dentures soaking in a paper cup next to him, he taught me how to play the blues..."