Fucking liar: The early years

Before Peggy Seltzer’s fucking lies (about growing up white in a black gang) got her a big book contract, Peggy told her phantasmagoric tales to another writer – Inga Muscio (pictured).

Some of those lies ended up in Ms. Muscio’s 2005 book “Autobiography of a Blue-Eyed Devil.”

Inga Muscio is a far-left feminist, a self-styled “anti-racist” and an atrocious writer. In the acknowledgments for “Blue-Eyed Devil,” Muscio wrote this:

“Peggy Seltzer, my platonic soulmate. I thank you for inviting me into your heart, for giving me books and music and laughter when I didn’t feel like there were any words or songs or happiness. You have single-handedly healed my heart in places where I did not know I was hurt. Thank you.”

You’re welcome, genius.

Here’s the relevant passage from the main body of Muscio’s book. She doesn’t mention Peggy by name... but the life details now make it obvious. Read it and wince.

INGA MUSCIO: South Central Los Angeles is right under our noses, and we don’t spend much time considering, or even seeing, the lived realities of people who reside there.

A friend of mine grew up in South Central Los Angeles. At a very young age, she figured out that the best way to insure that she’d wake up in the morning was to sleep with a pit bull curled up at her feet and a .38 under her pillow.

She learned to shoot a gun when she was eight, started carrying one every day when she was eleven, and can’t presently imagine life without one in her home, even if it is fully dismantled and locked away.

She once asked me if I had a heater.

“Yeah,” I said, not understanding why she was asking me about how I kept my home warm in the context of the discussion we were having, “but I prefer to use my woodstove.”

After a pause in which she momentarily wondered if “woodstove” was a slang term she wasn’t familiar with and promptly rejected this possibility, she cackled over in a fit of laughter.

“A heater is a gun,” she said. ...

My friend has post-traumatic stress disorder, which is frequently exacerbated by the need, just about every weekend of her adult life, to attend funerals of friends shot down in gang warfare.

She was in her late twenties when she realized that, when asked, most people who did not grow up around gang violence will say of course they have attended funerals.

When their grandparents died.

Which roughly adds up to about the same number of funerals my friend has attended on any given month of her life.

“What does it do to a person’s psyche,” she wonders aloud from time to time, “when they spend almost every weekend at a funeral.”

I do not know how to respond to this statement, which is never meant to be a question, but she knows I am listening.

That is very often all I have to offer my friend who grew up in South Central Los Angeles.

My listening, I mean.