A recently published memoir tells the woeful tale of a child growing up in a world of gangs, drug runners and gun crime. It has been described as "humane and deeply affecting", and a book tour has been planned to promote it.

Except it's all a lie. The book tour has been cancelled, all copies are being recalled, and the author seems out of favour in the publishing world. The book in question is "Love and Consequences" by Margaret B. Jones, a pseudonym of Margaret Seltzer, but it is not the first life story to have been conjured up in the mind of an author whose life bears no resemblance to that described within.

As the New York Times article discussing the impact of this revelation mentions, two others in recent years have been found to be partially or entirely fictional; "A million little pieces" by James Frey and "Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years" by Misha Defonseca. Why an author would go to such lengths as to pretend to be an entirely different person to get a fictional book published as a factual memoir is a subject for much debate, but I have a theory that it's more related to the sorry state of publishing than character flaws of the author.

It seems that in the publishing world, schadenfreude is the vice of the moment. Were this book put to publishers as a pure fiction, would it have even made it off the slush pile? By touting it as a true story of pain and hardship, by describing in agonizing detail the suffering of a young girl born into a world of hate, it suddenly becomes so much more saleable. It seems that unless somebody really suffered, unless the people mentioned in the book were really living the hell the author describes, then the story just isn't moving. If a reader was moved enough to seriously consider the implications of the book when they thought it was true, then why not when it is revealed as a fiction based on truth?

This is not a new phenomenon, but it is increasingly the case that books are being published just because people like to point and stare. Celebrity biographies, true stories of cursed lives, or exposés of failings and mistakes of people in the public eye are selling by the truck-load and the bovine masses are swallowing it whole, chewing the cud and regurgitating the steaming mass of gossip and misinformation. Look at any magazine rack to see the effect of this unhealthy obsession.

As for Ms. Seltzer, she is in the news at the moment for what most would consider the wrong reasons. However, as the old saying goes, there's no such thing as bad publicity. It's obvious from the initial reaction to her book that she can write a moving, realistic story filled with characters and situations that are immediately believable. Spin that, and sell books on the gritty realism. Cynical, maybe, but no more so than rest of this modern life.