“ Ms. Seltzer told her editor and her publisher that she wanted to use the pseudonym because it was the name she was known by in the gang world and because she was trying to reconnect with her birth mother and felt that using her real name would complicate this effort. But she lied to them and in the book about most of the basic elements of her identity, claiming that she was part American Indian and that she had moved from foster home to foster home as a child. In fact, as she admitted on Monday, she grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, and graduated from a private Episcopal day school.
— It is so much harder to tell the truth than to make something up. Very sad … because someone this talented could surely find her way to truth if she hadn’t taken the easy way out. But that would require suffering.
