White author admits she lied in bestselling book about her life with black gangbangers

Raised by a black foster mother known as "Big Mom," Jones tells the story of losing her foster brother, Terrell, who was shot and killed by the rival Crips gang right outside Big Mom's house.

The story, which plays on several of the common stereotypes about African Americans in the hood, was praised by reviewers, including the New York Times's Michiko Kakutani, who said that Jones wrote "with a novelist's eye for the psychological detail and an anthropologist's eye for social rituals and routines."

Even O, the Oprah magazine, described the book as a "startlingly tender memoir." That would prove ironic because there was one problem with Jones's story.  It wasn't true.

Margaret B. Jones was actually Margaret Seltzer, who grew up in an affluent Los Angeles community and attended private schools. She was not half-Native American, as she claimed in the book; she was all white.

In an interview with the New York Times, Seltzer admitted that she had lied in the book and wrote it while sitting in a Starbucks in South-Central.

This is not the first time an author has lied in a memoir. The Times compared Seltzer's dishonesty to that of Misha Defonseca, who was exposed last week for writing a fake Holocaust memoir.

Then there is James Frey, perhaps the most famous recent example.  Frey, the author of a "A Million Little Pieces," had to go on The Oprah Winfrey Show and apologize for lying to Oprah and the world about his memoir about drug addiction and redemption.