An antidote to the Margaret B. Joneses

THE depressingly familiar story about white Valley girl Margaret Seltzer faking her memoir as a dope-dealing, mixed-race gangster growing up in South Los Angeles sent me running to the bookshelf for an antidote – a novel about that world that is as haunting and painful and tough and tender and true as Seltzer’s memoir is false. A book so compelling that I can’t believe it isn’t required reading for policymakers and schools throughout the city – and an Oprah Winfrey pick to boot.

I’m talking about Jervey Tervalon’s 1994 inner city L.A. novel “Understand This,” which follows eight teens struggling to stay alive amid drugs, gangs and violence – and the high school teacher who encourages them.

“Understand This” was published two years after the Rodney King riots tore apart Los Angeles, and Tervalon – who grew up in Crips territory in Jefferson Park and later taught high school in the ‘hood and mourned the murder of one of his favorite students – is the real deal.

But don’t take my word for it (full disclosure: I know Jervey). Take Publishers Weekly’s: “The gritty reality of teenage lives in the violent caldron of urban Los Angeles is perfectly captured in this graphic, vividly realized first novel… . Individually, the voices are vibrant and personal; together, they create a dizzying mosaic of struggle and despair, promise and hopelessness. Tervalon’s achievement is in creating a troubling, kaleidoscopic word picture of lives, and life, in modern-day Los Angeles.”

Unlike Seltzer – whose claim that she wrote her book in a South-Central Starbucks while chatting with Black Panther kids rang false – Tervalon has the street cred Seltzer so badly wanted. But he chose to write a novel, not a memoir. (And I doubt he got a publishing contract that allowed him to set up college trust funds for his kids either, which is what Seltzer bragged to the New York Times.)

Is that because memoir is more highly valued in today’s marketplace than fiction? I don’t know, but I fear that with these two latest frauds (the Belgian Holocaust wolf memoir is the other) the genre may be tarnished for me beyond repair. How can you believe any of them? Whereas with fiction, there may be autobiographical bits, but the alchemy of the imagination transforms it into a tale that, if told properly, feels innately true.

Plenty of people are going to slam Seltzer, and she certainly deserves it. I propose channeling that ire into something more productive. Go to a bookstore or a library and check out authentic books about this neglected part of our city, starting with “Understand This.” Read them. Talk about them. Then do something small, like donating a few children’s books to a school in an underprivileged area whose libraries are paltry or nonexistent. Perhaps if more of our kids grow up with the writing and reading skills that Seltzer got at her tony private school, there will be fewer adults around who have to write harrowing memoirs that are real. *