Letters to the Editor
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Intent
Intent has everything to do with whether or not something is a lie.
The oddities in the Bible (for example) are due to those stories being told orally, and, when they were written down, being written in the absence of history books or internet archives to make sure all the dates line up. We conclude that the writers had to guess, and did the best they could.
If Seltzer's book were titled, "The Autobiography of Margaret B. Jones, by Margaret Seltzer," I could see the comparison to Stein's faux autobio of Alice B. Toklas. But it's not.
The odd details of the diaries (Nin, Frank) point out, better than anything, how readers accept that "fact is stranger than fiction," and are willing to go along with details in non-fiction that would be rejected in fiction. In other words, you can pass off BAD fiction as non-fiction, by being a dirty liar. (And in today's market make more money doing it.)
Like some of the other readers, I find this satire less funny than cutesy, and since I do care about being lied to, it's the kind of cutesy you kind of what to slap off someone's face.