MEGAN MCARDLE: ‘Primates of Park Avenue,’ Stranger Than Nonfiction. “It turns out that I am not the only one to have wondered about some of her stories. Vanity Fair talked to verified Upper East Side rich wives, and found them skeptical, too. Then some New York Post reporters checked into the timeline of her book and discovered that parts of it didn’t make any sense: according to them, she recounts an East Side co-op board interviewing her while she’s pregnant, even though she was not, in fact, pregnant when she moved to the East Side; she reports losing the pregnancy weight from her second son at a gym that didn’t yet exist when she was an Upper East Sider; she reports seeing macarons from a store that didn’t arrive until years later; and she drops Uber into a conversation that is supposed to have happened years before the service started operating. . . . Martin’s publicity has leaned heavily on the fact that she is a PhD who has studied anthropology, even though her PhD is in comparative literature and cultural studies. What she is doing in “Primates of Park Avenue” is the opposite of good anthropological field work; it claims far too much, and collects far too little actual evidence.”

So, kind of like Alice Goffman, then.