Lies, Truths, and Dangling Modifiers

"How do we deserve the trust of readers," Tina McElroy Ansa writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “if we don’t vet for truth?” She is incensed at Love and Consequences: A Memoir of Hope and Survival, recently published by Riverhead Books--a memoir, specifically, of a mixed-race gangbanger named Margaret B. Jones, actually written by a white woman from the San Fernando Valley named Margaret “Peggy” Seltzer. Riverhead Books, a Penguin imprint, has recalled every unsold copy of the book and canceled the author’s book tour. This, clearly, is serious business.

The amazon.com page provides this “editorial review" of the book, with a telling preamble:

Book Description
Note: The following book description was written before the recent revelations about the book.

A stunning memoir of a mixed-race girl growing up in gang-ridden South Central Los Angeles, where she followed her foster brothers into the Bloods before she hit puberty: what she witnessed, how she survived, and--against all odds--thrived.

This is a powerful portrait of life in L.A.'s gangland and drug trade as told through one household: a single, overworked grandmother, her two grandsons (who drop out of school and become Bloods before puberty), her two crack-baby granddaughters, and the foster child--the author--who comes to live with them at age eight, joins the gang, and then defies the odds, using education to climb her way out.

After her two foster brothers were "jumped in" by the Bloods at ages twelve and thirteen, Margaret--renamed "Bree" in her new street life--followed their example. At twelve she was making deliveries for local dealers in the gang. For her thirteenth birthday she received her own gun. At sixteen, forced to find a way to keep the water from being shut off in her foster home, she learned to cook crack cocaine. Soon after, she fell in love for the first time, dating a seasoned gang member until he was sentenced to life in prison. We observe the lives of these characters from childhood through adolescence and into early adulthood. For some, this means following a trajectory of crime, pregnancy, imprisonment-and ultimately, death. But for Margaret, her obvious intelligence, will, and tenacity--aided by sheer luck--enable her to break free, to graduate from high school, and then college. The strength of this book is testament to the remarkable adult she has become.

This unvarnished, humanizing portrait of people living in urban poverty transcends both statistics and stereotypes, and reveals the power of family in a chaotic world-and the poignancy of smart, philosophical teens who dream of a safer life waiting for them beyond the streets.

To my mind, the interesting question here is not whether Jones lied or told the truth, since all writing is a mixture of both lies and truths; rather, the interesting question is what she’s trying to do to us behind the scenes of her fictitious memoir. In our terms from Writing as Drama: what is her unnamed purpose? Is it to make a ton of money? Is it to swindle the reader? That would be an unnamed purpose to wax indignant about. Or is it, as the author herself says, to dramatize the plight of the inner-city poor in a rhetorically powerful way?

"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."

Since reviewers did find the fake-memoir-cum-novel both moving and novelistic, it would seem Seltzer’s aim was in fact realized.

The vicious attacks on Seltzer for her success--er, sorry, her "mendacity"--remind me, in fact, of the eighteenth-century bishop who wrote of Gulliver’s Travels: "I personally believe that every word of this book is a damned lie." That novel was a fake memoir too. So was Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. So was Fielding’s Tom Jones. So in some sense is every first-person novel ever published. So what’s the difference now? That the publisher marketed the book as a memoir rather than as a novel?

What I find much more disturbing than Seltzer’s ostensible mendacity is the high-minded pontifications of her critics. Looking back at Tina McElroy Ansa’s editorializing on the book, for example, I wonder: how do we deserve the trust of readers--

"As a journalist for more than 35 years, a novelist for 20 and as a new publisher concentrating in African-American literature, these are questions I have discussed, considered and struggled with for some time."

--if we don't vet for dangling modifiers?

Actually, I've begun to suspect that dangling modifiers are an important constitutive component of pompous, self-righteous rhetoric. Could it be that the slippage between "these are questions" and "I have discussed" is an essential dodge for this sort of finger-pointing pontification? That Tina McElroy Ansa would be (or feel) rhetorically too accountable if she began her main clause too with the grammatical subject required by "As a journalist"?

Or here:

"For a public facing the shrinking and elimination of conventional venues of reliable information such as daily newspapers, Sunday magazine sections and talk shows of substance, the recurring revelations of fake memoirs leave us all vulnerable to lies."

That isn't exactly a dangling modifier, but the sentence again obfuscates what is happening to whom and how and why and in what context. "For a public" and "leave us all" push or pull the contextualization of danger and blame in different directions. Are "we" and "the public" the same people there? If so, "we" are first the indirect objects, then the direct objects, of the danger-laden verbs. The grammatical shift in between suggests that the people who are left vulnerable to lies are not the public at all but someone else, perhaps those responsible for educating the public; except that the shift isn't decisive enough to push us across this sort of binary gap, leaving us stranded somewhere in the middle between an us/public identification and an us/public split.

Okay, okay, so she just didn't edit her copy attentively enough. Am I being nitpicky? Should someone who proudly establishes her bona fides as a journalist, novelist, and publisher not be allowed a few grammatical solecisms when she castigates what she takes to be shoddy writing in public? Don't we all do this?

As an English professor for 33 years, a novelist for one, and as a writing-program administrator, it would have to be said in all honesty that I never do.