Two weeks ago, I placed an order on Amazon. com for a book titled Love and Consequences. The memoir’s dust jacket promised a story of a young woman, named Margaret B. Jones, who survived Los Angeles gang life--and lived to tell about it. Problem is. The telling is a 300-page lie. Before the author’s older sister notified the publisher that the book was made-up, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani wrote glowingly, "She captures the brutal realities of a place where children learn to sleep on the floor to avoid the random bullets that might come smashing through the windows and walls at night... She conveys the extraordinary stoicism (坚忍克已) of women like Big Morn, her foster mother, who raised four grandchildren while working a day job and a night job." But in fact, the name Margaret B. Jones was a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, a young woman who, according to a subsequent story in The Times, "grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles." In that neighborhood, bullets don’t often tear into walls, and moms don’t often have to work two jobs to keep food on the table. Seltzer, 33 and now living in Oregon, reportedly got her inspiration for the book after working with LA organizations to fight gang violence. "I’m not saying, like, I did it right," Selzter said. "I did not do it right... 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." This fabrication is just one of several that have recently managed to hit the bookshelves before publishers realize that they have been duped. At the beginning of March, a Holocaust (浩劫) memoir, Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years by Misha Defonseca, was exposed as a fake. Two years ago, a popular memoir about a man’s recovery from drug addiction, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey, was also famously discredited. Besides embarrassing the publishers and no doubt, ruining the reputation of the writers, such books also pose problems (though much smaller in scale) to those of us who have bought and/or read them. After all, memoirs are supposed to carry an extra amount of authority. When readers pick them up, they expect to enter a reality as seen by someone who has participated in it. Readers believe the conversations, characters and experiences--along with the emotions they invoke to be genuine (if sometimes a bit embellished). So when that lie finally arrives in the mail, will I be able to read it I doubt it. The book will probably end up getting an undeserved slot on my bookshelf, and I’ll probably never crack it open. After all, while reading about gunfire in the streets and moms raising kids in fatherless homes, I’d be unable to get this image of a younger Seltzer out of my mind: Instead of ducking her head when bullets pound her living room wall, she’s sleeping soundly in a bed covered with pillows. Instead of being cared for by a tired woman working two jobs, she’s the daughter of two successful professionals, and a loyal viewer of a popular crime drama on TV. Margaret B. Jones is the ______ for Margaret Seltzer.