A colleague last week said to me with envy, "You've got a column now, maybe two or three."

I think just one, really.

The premise was another in the all-too-familiar round of "creative" memoirs, in this case the outing of Margaret Seltzer, a delusional young woman who's a good writer, especially of fiction, but we expect memoirs to be truthful. Hers were not.

Her work, "Love and Consequences," just published by Riverhead Books, a respected branch of the Penguin publishing empire, is subtitled "A Memoir of Hope and Survival."

Under the pen name Margaret B. Jones, she writes:

"My words and views were learned in the dirt and desolation of South Central Los Angeles. The streets where I grew up were run by the laws of the local gangs."

The remainder of her book is an emotionally rendered story of those streets through the eyes of a young girl of white and American Indian parents raised by a black foster mother.

Was she sexually abused as a tot? True, dat.

Name a few other "common" experiences of life in a drug-infested slum -- shootings, dealing, addiction, prostitution, jail -- and she describes them in a phonetically written dialect direct from HBO's "The Wire":

"Ah," he said, pausing. "Fa sho ... Kome on, let's go."

Margaret "survives" to adulthood, settling in Eugene, Ore., where she was interviewed for a New York Times profile.

Her sister read the Feb. 28 Times story, "A Refugee From Gangland," and told Riverhead the truth about "Jones": She's really a white woman from a wealthy family in Sherman Oaks, Calif. The ghetto life was a dream.

To its credit, Riverhead immediately recalled the book and offered refunds. It made Seltzer's editor, Sarah McGrath, and other staffers available to the press, even though their excuses for being deceived were naive and feeble.

Then it was revealed Thursday that this is not the first time McGrath was fooled. Publishers Weekly reported that she acquired an "expose" of the fashion industry in 2006 for about $900,000 but canceled the deal when her author was exposed as a liar and plagiarizer by Women's Wear Daily.

The reputation of the Times itself sunk a few notches over its generous coverage of "Love and Consequences." An upbeat review by the normally dour Michiko Kakutani preceded the profile.

In revealing the Seltzer hoax, the newspaper acknowledged that McGrath is the daughter of Charles McGrath, former editor of the Sunday Book Review and now a feature writer who focuses on authors.

Sinister? No, just a bit of well-intentioned insider favoritism. Happens all the time.

But let's forget all the details of the current expose, including the Times' complicity.

What the Seltzer hoax really accomplishes is the long-postponed acceptance of the memoir as another form of fiction. We must stop pretending that anything with that label is true.

To bolster my argument, I quote Lee Gutkind, the hard-working promoter of that popular academic school of writing he calls "creative nonfiction," much of which is memoir.

In a letter to Harper's magazine in January criticizing an article critical of memoir, the University of Pittsburgh professor wrote:

"... the factual details of memoir are considerably less important than the writer's intentions in revealing, describing and re-creating stories."

Gutkind was referring to a section in his memoir about a childhood moment disputed by his parents:

"Even if Alan Levy [a friend] had not confirmed my recollection, the story was mine, true and factual [italics mine] to my memory, real or partially imagined, a genuine memoir."

"Love and Consequences" might have seemed true and factual to Seltzer as she imagined the details of a life in South Central L.A. She was so skilled at that imagining that she created a wonderful book that a major publisher not only believed in, but paid her well for it.

Gutkind would never countenance the utter fabrication of writers like Seltzer under the creative nonfiction guidelines, but his letter does stretch the tolerance gauge for memoir to the point where literary license is given broad latitude.

Her work justifies Gutkind's stand that "most readers are seeking enjoyment and enlightenment from books no matter the work's purported genre. ... Artful, meaningful expression will find its true audience and define itself."

Fine. Then let's define memoir as fiction and forget all this nonsense about the "truth."

According to Gutkind, readers don't care anyway.