I was eight and a half when I moved to South Central Los Angeles, the city's large inner core divided among 775 different gangs — Blood, Crip, Sur, 18th St., or MS — which ran the different neighborhoods like training grounds, enforcing the laws of the street more strictly and consistently than the police enforced the official ones.

My foster family's particular neighborhood was controlled by one of the seventy-five-plus Blood gangs within L.A. County. While each gang's set varied in the size of its turf and number and activity level of its members, since our set was geographically located between two other Blood sets that we shared good relations with and referred to as "neighbors," we had power in our size and strength.

It was a completely unspectacular neighborhood, full of small bungalow-style homes and two-story apartment buildings, often carefully tended, but with burnt-out yards and Chevys that ranged from primered and dented with missing parts, to custom candy-colored lowriders with two-thousand-dollar gold Dayton hundred-spoke wire wheels. The area was shared by USC students, Black Muslim intellectuals, crackheads, prostitutes, and groups of gang members, some of whom were decked out in expensive clothing and gold jewelry. It was this latter group — the gang members — that caught my attention, and I watched in awe as their lowrider car club three-wheeled and bounced down the streets.

The leaders of the gang were the OGs — "original gangsters." To me they were like celebrities. One of the OGs went by the name of Kraziak. He was in his early thirties, light-skinned with long hair that he kept in meticulous braids. Every week, he had them freshly done in elaborate designs. He drove a candy-red 1969 Chevy Chevelle Malibu Super Sport with two black racing stripes up the middle and a red flag (bandana) neatly folded and tied around the rearview mirror. From the stories Kraziak told, it seemed as though he'd been around almost as long as the hood itself. He knew everything about L.A.'s history, not only the history of our gang's conception, but that of all the gangs. He told us about the Purple Hearts, and the Slausons, the gangs that preceded the Bloods and Crips, how they had formed in the forties and fifties to protect the community against the rampant racial violence.

Kraziak had moved out of the hood. He now stayed over in Hawthorne by the airport with his girlfriend, two sons, and baby daughter. He still came through on the daily, though, parking the Malibu on the street across from the park, its windows blatantly rolled down. Kraziak was so revered, no one would dare mess with his ride. Heading into the park, to the benches in the back grassy area where the homies usually hung out, he would stop and ask the women whose babydaddys, sons, or husbands were locked up in juvie or prison how things were going at home. When the ice cream truck came by, he'd treat all the kids to popsicles or candy bars, paying the driver with a crisp hundred-dollar bill.

Sometimes, he stopped and talked to me. We talked about L.A. history, life at home, or maybe just how hot it was outside. He always ended the conversation by reaching into his pocket, pulling out a few extra bills and telling me, "Be true to the game, live by her rules, and she will always bless you." Then he'd hand me the money and wink. Him thinking that I was worth his attention made me more proud than any school award or honor ever could. It meant I was going somewhere.

I loved being in the neighborhood and took every chance I had to be out there among the hustle. It made me feel important, like I was — or could become — part of something. I emulated the gang members' style of dress and walk, studied the gang hand signs. At twelve, Kraziak finally hooked me up with a position. I was grateful for the work, eager to earn my own money toward the flame-red Nike Cortez with fat laces that everyone else wore, but even more excited to prove myself worthy of wearing the affiliated color and moving up in the ranks.

My job was to approach anyone wanting to buy drugs, see what they wanted, and check them out to make sure they weren't the police. Then, if I felt okay about it, I would take their money, tell them where to go, and gesture my approval to the homie who was holding the drugs. There were all kinds of people buying drugs in the area — white suburban teens, college kids in nice cars, and even the occasional businessman in a big luxury Mercedes or BMW. Usually, though, it was just the neighborhood crackheads, whom we called baseheads or smokers. It was sad seeing the strung-out and desperate begging in front of their kids, but some of the other baseheads were funny to watch. They would tell wild stories, trying to get you to front them some drugs or offer to do just about anything for the smallest amounts of cash. Once I saw a younger homie pay a basehead two dollars to eat dog [expletive]. We all laughed over that for a week. But mostly it was a boring job with a lot of time sitting around, waiting and [expletive].

My foster mom liked for all of the girls in the house to wear braids. She said they looked neat and clean and she didn't want us running around looking like "ragamuffins." Because her long hours scrubbing floors and walls left her fingers stiff, and because I was the oldest girl, I would braid my foster sisters' hair for her; when I was done with them, Big Mom would do mine. It always came out in embarrassingly crooked, loose cornrows, made even worse by the fact that though thick and wavy, my hair didn't really have the texture to hold it. I killed a lot of time on the job unbraiding my hair and daydreaming about the shoes and things I was going to buy for myself and my two little foster sisters. I loved the thought that thanks to my after-school activities my girls wouldn't be teased for wearing hand-me-downs like I had in elementary school. Things were only gonna get better. "Sky's the limit," Kraziak would say as he handed me my cut of the money we made, usually giving me an extra twenty off the top as a reward for my good work.

This particular day I had just unraveled the last of my braids and was shooting the pile of small black elastic bands at a crack vial on the sidewalk, pushing it slowly toward the curb with each hit.

"Good aim, lil homegirl," said one of the homies in a red shirt, Dickies pants, and a thick gang tattoo in Olde English font just above his shirt line as he crossed the street. I ¬didn't know him, but he looked over twenty so I knew he must be one of the big homies. I smiled, embarrassed at being caught playing a child's game. I brushed away the remaining rubber bands, sending them scattering over the thin strip of grass in front of the sidewalk and watched as he made his way through the park. In the distance, a silver Cadillac caught my eye. I stood up, running my hands over the deep waves my braids had left in my hair and pulled my red LA fitted cap onto my head. As the car pulled a U-turn in the intersection and slowed down to circle back onto the block for the second time, I stepped off the curb into the street. Something bad was about to happen. I started running toward the park, waving my hands and gesturing coded signs to Kraziak, Freddy, Slikk, and some of the other homies I knew standing under the palm trees that marked the park's entrance across the street. My stomach felt queasy.

The Caddy had dark tinted windows and Dayton wire wheels, while the businessmen and students who drove similar cars into the area almost always rolled on stock rims. Its unfamiliarity and slow speed were suspicious.

Kraziak turned, and I could hear the man on the passenger side start to talk. "Where you from, cuz?" The man spoke the words in a strong, confident voice. It was a trick question. "Cuz" is a word used only between Crips, and this street was clearly Blood turf.

"What's that neighborhood Crip like?" he then said even louder. Everyone started running away from the park or getting down under the tables. I looked down at my black Chuck Taylors with their wide red laces and tongues flipped and wondered if the driver's-side window was about to roll down, too. And then the street erupted. A blur of sound, everyone yelling at the same time, over which, Kraziak's voice carried: "This is Blood, homie."

The next sounds were explosions. Gunshots. I panicked, running back and ducking behind a car. I squeezed my eyes shut, but I could hear several different guns, the steady bursts of an AK-47 and the strong, hard single explosions of handguns. They sounded so close, I thought for sure I was going to get hit. I thought the explosions and screaming might never stop.

Then tires peeled out. I opened my eyes. The Crip car, no longer slow and teasing, flew off around the corner, and I watched as homies from my neighborhood jumped into four parked cars and started off after them from all different directions around the small park. One ragtop Impala pulled out in front of me, slowing down just enough for one of the homies to jump in over the closed door. The sound of gunfire grew softer as the cars got farther away down the street. I struggled to get back on my feet, my legs wobbly and my breath stuck in my throat.

As the sound of gunfire faded, people started to come out of everywhere, running from the corners of the park, stepping out of houses and apartment buildings. I could hear women screaming, and a baby crying. I knew that with the number of bullets I had heard, someone had to have been hit. My head felt hot and light, as though I might faint as I crossed the street and pushed my way through the commotion.

As I got closer to the aftermath, I could see two men immobilized on the sidewalk, bleeding, and another in the street. I was scared to look and see who was hit, or how badly. My eyes stopped first on the man in the street. It was Freddy, a good friend of both of my two foster brothers. The homies were helping him stand up, and blood poured out of his shoulder and down his arm and chest, pooling on the sidewalk. The other man was a dark-skinned YG (young gangsta) in his late teens. He was from the hood, but my brothers had warned me to stay away from him, and I had listened. He was shot in the leg and the bullet must have hit the bone and shattered it because the leg was twisted, with the foot turned in against the ground and the knee a full quarter rotation to the right. I pushed a little deeper into the crowd and saw that the man farthest back toward the park was Kraziak.

I was in shock. I felt choked. I had seen people get shot before, seen bodies lying in the street while the homicide people looked for clues, but I had never seen anyone I cared about laid out like that. Everything else blurred. All I could see was Kraziak. He must have been hit more than ten times. Blood bubbled out of his mouth and neck and he gasped, trying to breathe. One of the homies clutched him in his arms and held him up to keep him from choking on his own blood.

"Kall nine-one-one!" people yelled.

"Fukk nine-one-one!" the homie holding Kraziak yelled, "Someone get a kar, we gotta get him to the hospital. Let's go!"

The blood was everywhere. I never realized how much blood was inside a person, or how much could come out. The smell enveloped the area. It smelled like life and death all at the same time, a sickly sweet and slightly rotten smell. It felt like it was smothering me.

"Let's go!" the homie yelled at everyone, over and over. "K'mon, let's go!" Three of them lifted Kraziak up and carried him right past where I stood. I wanted to look away but couldn't. I wanted to reach out and touch him, but I couldn't do that, either. His face and neck had started to swell and he was almost unrecognizable. He moaned as they lifted him into the car, the sound pushing blood out of his mouth and neck.

"Is he gone live?" I asked as the car pulled away. Tears ran hot and wet down my face.

"Hard ta say," one of the homies said and shook his head. "I known people who got shot once and died and people who got shot ten times and lived."

I didn't want Kraziak to die. I sat down on the curb where a few moments before I had felt proud, confident, and part of something greater than myself and tried to stop crying. My body shuddered with uneven breaths as I wiped at my eyes.

By the time the cops pulled up at the scene, the blood had dried and turned yellow on the concrete where the plasma had started to separate. They were the ones who told us Kraziak had been pronounced dead at the county hospital. His blood now belonged to the flies. The sky was starting to darken, and red streaks appeared against the hills. All of a sudden all I could think about was how Big Mom was going to whoop my ass if I came home after the streetlights clicked on.

The cops put up yellow crime-scene tape and established a perimeter, then started going around asking everyone if they had seen anything. No one said they had.

One cop looked over the crowd of people now quickly dispersing and pointed a gloved finger at me, probably hoping that the child in me would come out and tell him what he knew I had witnessed.

"Naw, man. I ain seen shyt," I bit down hard on my lower lip at the end of my words. The policeman looked at me and then held out a business card.

"In case you change your mind," he said. I hesitated but finally reached out and took it, both of us knowing I would never call. In a few hours the police would be performing the same task in the Crip neighborhood a few blocks to the north, a different set of onlookers shaking their heads, denying that they'd seen our homies catch up to the other car and execute a message of revenge.

In South Central, the myth of human kindness and compassion ends and self-preservation is the ruling principle. At the end of the day what you know and have seen is no one's business but your own. It's a cold game, but what you know can kill you just as fast as what you don't. Snitches and rats dig their own graves.

As the police pulled away, we started to pick up the remains of the crime-scene tape that lay on the ground, wrapped around lamp-posts and telephone poles or blowing into the park. I took a piece and tied it around my wrist.

One of the big homies I didn't know, obviously shaken, said he was going to the store. He drove the few blocks to Tony's Liquor and returned quickly with a bottle of Hennessey and a stack of plastic cups.

"Here," he said, offering me one. I shook my head no and pulled nervously at my new bracelet. I couldn't stop picturing Kraziak's face, swollen and covered with blood. "It makes the thoughts go down easier," he said, handing me a cup anyway.

I took the flimsy cup and watched as he poured a little of the amber liquid, first onto the ground and then into my cup. This was my first taste of straight Hennessey, although I had always seen the big homies drinking it that way. It tasted like burning, but almost instantly, as he had said, my head felt at least a little better.

The big homie smiled at me and then slipped the remaining cups over the neck of the Hennessey bottle, reaching into his back pocket with his spare hand.

"Chaser?" he asked, holding up a bottle of Pepsi. I nodded my head, still rubbing my tongue against the roof of my mouth, trying to kill the taste. "Here," he said and poured half the bottle on top of what was left of the Hennessey in my cup.

"Thanks," I said awkwardly. He smiled, tucking the Pepsi back into his pocket and walking off to pass out the rest of the cups.

I stood for a moment looking at the flies as they circled around the dried blood, landing and taking off over and over again in the day's last light. Then, eyes downcast, I started shuffling home. My foster sisters would be sitting on the sofa, watching cartoons and waiting for dinner — red beans or black-eyed peas, most likely. I knew Big Mom would make me set the table and then give me a whooping and send me to my room for coming home late. It didn't matter, though; I didn't want to sit at the table and listen to how everyone's day was, or have Big Mom ask me what I learned in school. I sipped the rest of the Pepsi and then threw the cup into the street.

As I watched it, a glint of light caught my eye and I bent down and pinched a bullet shell between my fingers, rolling it back and forth a few times before slipping it into my jeans. The whole walk home I kept the shell clenched tightly in my fist inside my pocket. I thought about Kraziak and the blood bubbling up out of his mouth and neck. It seemed impossible that he was gone, that I wouldn't see him at the park the next day or the day after that. I couldn't even imagine the place without him. I thought about how Kraziak always told me be true to the game and she would bless you. Would he still believe that now? For me, his death had disproved his maxim. If the Crips could kill Kraziak, it meant that no degree of love or respect from your homies could really protect you.

I quickened my pace as I walked the last few blocks from the park. The streets seemed different. I looked down the alleys and into the shadows thinking every movement was a threat and every stranger meant me harm. And that's when it happened. All the fear and sadness inside of me turned to rage. I hated that they had taken my big homie and even more that they had taken my sense of security. I hated that I felt as if no one could protect us: not our parents, not the police, not the game, not even ourselves. But the more I thought about it, the more I just hated the Crips. I thought about the homies speeding off after the Crip car. As I turned the corner and saw my house with Big Mom in the doorway, I vowed to be like those Bloods, to get even. We were on our own in the City of Angels, and we were smoking [epithet], sending them to heaven every day just to keep the name.

One day after the author of “Love and Consequences” confessed that she had made up the memoir about her supposed life as a foster child in gang-infested South-Central Los Angeles, the focus turned to her publisher and the news organizations that helped publicize what appeared to be a searing autobiography.

Geoffrey Kloske, publisher of Riverhead Books, the unit of Penguin Group USA that released the book, by Margaret Seltzer, under a pseudonym, Margaret B. Jones, said on Tuesday that there was nothing else that he or Sarah McGrath, the book’s editor, could have done to prevent the author from lying.

“In hindsight we can second-guess all day things we could have looked for or found,” Mr. Kloske said. “The fact is that the author went to extraordinary lengths: she provided people who acted as her foster siblings. There was a professor who vouched for her work, and a writer who had written about her that seemed to corroborate her story.” He added that Ms. Seltzer had signed a contract in which she had legally promised to tell the truth. “The one thing we wish,” Mr. Kloske said, “is that the author had told us the truth.”

Riverhead has recalled nearly 19,000 copies of the book and is offering refunds to book buyers.

Ms. Seltzer told her editor and her publisher that she wanted to use the pseudonym because it was the name she was known by in the gang world and because she was trying to reconnect with her birth mother and felt that using her real name would complicate this effort. But she lied to them and in the book about most of the basic elements of her identity, claiming that she was part American Indian and that she had moved from foster home to foster home as a child. In fact, as she admitted on Monday, she grew up with her biological family in the prosperous Sherman Oaks neighborhood of Los Angeles, and graduated from a private Episcopal day school.

Ms. McGrath, who never met Ms. Seltzer during three years spent editing the book, said Ms. Seltzer, who lives in Eugene, Ore., had provided what she said were photographs of her foster siblings, a letter from a gang leader corroborating her story and had introduced her agent, Faye Bender, to a person who claimed to be a foster sister.

Ms. McGrath said she also trusted Ms. Seltzer because she had come through “a respected literary agent” who had in turn been referred to the author by a writer whom Ms. Bender had worked with previously.

Despite editing the book in the aftermath of the scandal surrounding James Frey, author of a best-selling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” who admitted making up or exaggerating details in his account of drug addiction and recovery, Ms. McGrath said she did not independently check parts of Ms. Seltzer’s story or perform any kind of background check. She said she relied on Ms. Seltzer to tell the truth.

“In the post-James Frey world, we all are more careful,” Ms. McGrath said. “I had numerous conversations with her about the need to be honest and the need to stick to the facts.”

Ms. Bender, Ms. Seltzer’s agent, said that the author had been using a false persona for years and that friends and colleagues — including Ms. Bender — believed she had grown up in foster care in the gangland of Los Angeles.

“There was no reason to doubt her, ever,” Ms. Bender said. Similarly, reporters who interviewed Ms. Seltzer were also taken in by her story. Tom Ashbrook, the host of “On Point,” a program on public radio, ran an interview with Ms. Seltzer (as Margaret B. Jones) in which she recounted her fake life. Mimi Read, a freelance reporter, wrote a profile of Ms. Seltzer that appeared on Thursday in the House & Home section of The New York Times and did not question the memoirist’s story.

“The way I look at it is that it’s just like when you get in a car and drive to the store — you assume that the other drivers on the road aren’t psychopaths on a suicide mission,” said Ms. Read, who was never told Ms. Seltzer’s real name by the publisher or by Ms. Seltzer. “She seemed to be who she said she was. Nothing in her home or conversation or happenstance led me to believe otherwise.”

Ms. Read said that she did contact Ms. Seltzer’s fiancé and also asked her to provide information about Uncle Madd Ronald, who Ms. Seltzer claimed was her gang leader and was now in prison. Ms. Seltzer provided a prison name and prison identification number, and a copy editor confirmed that the prison existed.

Ms. Read said she wished she had been more skeptical and done further fact-checking. “Of course I wish I could do it differently,” she said. “I think a lot of other people were fooled before me.”

Tom de Kay, editor of the House & Home section, said he asked Ms. Read to track down other people from Ms. Seltzer’s past to corroborate her story. Because Ms. Seltzer told Ms. Read that her foster siblings were dead, in prison or no longer in touch, it was difficult for Ms. Read to find people to interview.

Mr. de Kay said that ultimately, “I was to some degree trusting that the vetting process of a reputable book publisher was going to catch this level of duplicity.” But, he added: “Do I wish in retrospect that we had called L.A. child services and tried to run down the history of this person? I certainly do.”

In a publishing landscape that has been rocked by scandals like Mr. Frey’s fabrications and the hoax perpetrated by Laura Albert, the woman who posed as the novelist J T LeRoy, a supposed addict and son of a West Virginia prostitute, other publishers and agents said their business still operated on trust.

“It is not an industry capable of checking every last detail,” said Ira Silverberg, an agent who represented J T LeRoy (without knowing he was actually Ms. Albert) and Ishmael Beah, author of the best-selling memoir “A Long Way Gone,” who was recently accused by Australian journalists of distorting his service as a child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war during the 1990s, a charge that he and his publishers have repeatedly denied. “So to present yourself as something you are not betrays all the trust.”

Nan A. Talese, who published Mr. Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces,” said the combination of these recent episodes could start to change the business’s practices. “I think what editors are going to have to do is point to the things that happened recently and say to their authors, ‘If there is anything in your book that can be discovered to be untrue, you better let us know right now, and we’ll deal with it before we publish it,’ ” Ms. Talese said. But she added: “I don’t think there is any way you can fact-check every single book. It would be very insulting and divisive in the author-editor relationship.”

Sarah Crichton, publisher of her own imprint at Farrar, Straus & Giroux and the editor of “A Long Way Gone,” said she did some background checking on Mr. Beah. “I come out of journalism and so I certainly wanted to make sure the historical record was accurate,” said Ms. Crichton, a former editor at Newsweek. “But I will confess that I did the checking that I did also in part just to protect us, because I knew that we were going to be publishing into a changed landscape.”