The story within the pages of “Love and Consequences,” a Riverhead Books memoir written by a white woman claiming to have survived a dangerous life in a Los Angeles ghetto, has been exposed as a total fabrication.

Margaret Seltzer published a book with Penguin Group USA imprint Riverhead Books under the literary pseudonym of Margaret B. Jones; “Love and Consequences” was released last week and a book tour was to begin Monday but things are no longer going according to plan.

The New York Times exposed Seltzer as a fraud on Monday, after her older sister contacted the paper with a version of reality very much different from what Seltzer recounts in her book.

The woman, who is white, tells how she was raised in poverty by a black foster mother called Big Mom in South-Central Los Angeles. She defines herself in the memoir as a half-white, half-Native American girl and describes perilous activities she was involved in, such as selling drugs for a gang and carrying illegal guns.

She also confesses one of her foster brothers was gunned down by Crips gang members outside their home.

Cyndi Hoffman, her older sister, says otherwise though. After seeing an article about Seltzer in the New York Times accompanied by a photo of her sibling, she contacted the newspaper and revealed the truth.

Seltzer was actually raised in prosperous conditions in the San Fernando Valley in California; she lived with her biological family. She never lived with a foster family; she never sold drugs, never carried illegal weapons.

She graduated from the Campbell Hall School, a private Episcopal day school in the North Hollywood neighborhood. She did not graduate from the University of Oregon, as she had claimed.

Hoffman’s motives for exposing her younger sister are not revealed but she does accuse Riverhead of not checking the facts properly.

Seltzer subsequently said she had written the book from real stories told by real gang members, friends she made while working with groups that were trying to stop 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,” Seltzer told the Times Monday via phone. “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.

“I just felt that there was good that I could do and there was no other way that someone would listen to it…. I thought I had an opportunity to make people understand the conditions that people live in and the reasons people make the choices from the choices they don’t have.”

The publisher has recalled all copies of the book and has canceled Seltzer’s book tour, which was to begin on Monday.