The problem is that none of that is true.

Ms. Jones, a pseudonym for Margaret Seltzer, actually is all white and grew up in Sherman Oaks, in the San Fernando Valley of California, with her biological family. She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in North Hollywood. She has never lived with a foster family, nor did she run drugs for any gang members. She is still a few credits short of a diploma from University of Oregon.

Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that published “Love and Consequences,” is recalling all copies of the book and has canceled Ms. Seltzer’s book tour, which was scheduled to start on Monday in Eugene, Ore., where she currently lives.

In a sometimes tearful, often contrite telephone interview from her home on Monday, Ms. Seltzer, 33, who is known as Peggy, admitted that the personal story she tells in the book was entirely fabricated. She insisted, though, that many of the details in the book were based on the experiences of close friends she had met over the years while working to reduce gang violence in Los Angeles.

“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.”

Ms. Seltzer’s story started unraveling last Thursday after she was profiled in the House & Home section of The New York Times. The article appeared alongside a photograph of Ms. Seltzer (still using her pseudonym) and her 8-year-old daughter, Rya. Ms. Seltzer’s older sister, Cynthia Seltzer Hoffman, saw the piece and called Riverhead to tell them that Ms. Seltzer’s story was untrue.

“Love and Consequences” immediately hit a note with many reviewers. Writing in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani praised the “humane and deeply affecting memoir,” but noted that some of the scenes “can feel self-consciously novelistic at times.” In Entertainment Weekly, Vanessa Juarez wrote that “readers may wonder if Jones embellishes the dialogue” but went on to extol the “powerful story of resilience and unconditional love.”

Sarah McGrath, the editor at Riverhead who worked with Ms. Seltzer for three years on the book, said she was stunned to discover that the author had lied. “It’s very upsetting to us because we spent so much time with this person and we felt such sympathy for her and she would talk about how she didn’t have any money or any heat and we completely bought into that and thought we were doing something good by bringing her story to light,” Ms. McGrath said. “I continue to feel deeply sad about what’s happened here, but there’s a huge personal betrayal here as well as a professional one.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had been writing about her friends’ experiences for years in creative writing classes and on her own before a professor asked her to speak with Inga Muscio, an author who was then working on a book about racism. Ms. Seltzer talked about what she portrayed as her experiences and Ms. Muscio used some of those accounts in her book. Ms. Muscio then referred Ms. Seltzer to her agent, Faye Bender, who read some pages that Ms. Seltzer had written and encouraged the young author to write more.

In April 2005, Ms. Bender submitted about 100 pages to four publishers. Ms. McGrath, then at Scribner, a unit of Simon & Schuster, agreed to a deal for what she said was under $100,000. When Ms. McGrath moved to Riverhead in 2006, she moved Ms. Seltzer’s contract.

Over the course of three years, Ms. McGrath, who is the daughter of Charles McGrath, a writer at large at The New York Times, worked closely with Ms. Seltzer on the book. “I’ve been talking to her on the phone and getting e-mails from her for three years and her story never has changed,” Ms. McGrath said. “All the details have been the same. There never have been any cracks.”

Ms. Seltzer said she had met some gang members during a short stint she said she spent at “Grant” high school “in the Valley.” (A Google search identifies Ulysses S. Grant High School, a school on 34 acres in the Valley Glen neighborhood in the east central San Fernando Valley.) “It opened my mind to the fact that not everybody is as they are portrayed on the news,” she said. “Everything’s not that black and white or gray or brown.”

She said that although she returned to Campbell Hall to graduate, she remained in touch with people she met at Grant and then began working with advocacy groups that were trying to stop gang violence. She said that even after she moved to Oregon to attend college, she would often venture to South Central Los Angeles to spend time with friends in the gang world.

In the book, she describes her foster mother, Big Mom, an African-American woman who raised four grandchildren, and a foster brother, Terrell, who was gunned down by members of the Crips right outside her foster mother’s home.

Ms. Seltzer, who writes in an author’s note to the book that she “combined characters and changed names, dates, and places,” said that these characters and incidents were in part based on friends’ experiences. “I had a couple of friends who had moms who were like my mom and that’s where Big Mom comes from — from being in the house all the time and watching what goes on. One of my best friend’s little brother was killed two years ago, shot,” she said.

Ms. Seltzer added that she wrote the book “sitting at the Starbucks at the corner of Crenshaw and Stockyard. People would come in and say, ‘What are you doing?’ because I would be sitting there all day every day. I would talk to kids who were Black Panthers and kids who were gang members and kids who were not gang members.”

Now she’s O-for-two.

A second memoir hailed by Oprah Winfrey’s media empire was exposed as a fraud when author Margaret B. Jones - who claimed to be a biracial gang-banger - was revealed as Margaret Seltzer, a well-to-do San Fernando Valley girl.

“Love and Consequences” was published last week to generally rave reviews - and on her MySpace page, Jones/Seltzer trumpeted the plug from O, The Oprah Magazine.

A “startlingly tender memoir,” read the enthusiastic blurb.

Uh-O!

Publisher Riverhead Books was forced to recall 19,000 copies of the book yesterday after Seltzer admitted her gripping tale of running drugs for a South Central Los Angeles gang was a work of fiction.

“Riverhead is saddened by this turn of events,” the publisher said in a statement. “We feel bad for our readers, Peggy and her family.”

Oprah’s magazine also backed off its praise. “While it was a great read, we now know that it should have been classified as fiction, rather than as a memoir, said Amy Gross, editor in chief.

“Love and Consequences” was the second memoir revealed as a hoax in the past week - the first came when author Misha Defonseca acknowledged that her 1997 book “Misha: A Memoir of the Holocaust Years” was a fake.

More memorably, author James Frey received a nationally broadcast, verbal spanking from Winfrey two years ago after admitting he invented or exaggerated sections of his best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces.”

Winfrey selected Frey’s autobiography for her Oprah Book Club audience.

Seltzer, 33, was exposed by her sister, who read a profile of the author last week in The New York Times and then contacted the paper. The Times confronted Seltzer, who was tearful and contrite in admitting the deception.

Riverhead Books canceled a planned book tour for Seltzer. The publisher will offer refunds for anyone who bought the book.

The MySpace page set up by the author was yanked, and the voicemail box at her Oregon home was filled yesterday.

The latest scandal came despite the efforts of Seltzer’s editors, who fact-checked the story. Riverhead said Seltzer’s duplicity included bogus photos, letters and even fake foster siblings, whom she produced to verify her story.

The hoax demonstrates the difficulty publishers face in separating truth from fiction in memoirs.

“One cannot protect oneself 100% from a dedicated hoaxster any more than one can protect oneself 100% from a dedicated terrorist,” said Sara Nelson, editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.