Your Obscenely Overpaid, Plagiarizing Young Author Update
Though Kaavya Viswanathan has confessed to being subconsciously "influenced" by the work of Megan McCafferty to the point of reproducing passages from McCafferty's books for her own bestselling debut How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, there's still literary chatter to suggest there's more to the story than just that. In particular, a former TA of Viswanathan writes, "Kaavya was my student last spring (in a section where I was a TA). I was surprised to learn she had written a book, as her writing was awful- I had given her low grades on her papers."
So let's assume, perhaps rightly, that Viswanathan isn't quite so gifted as a writer, despite her $500,000 book deal. What's her publisher (Little, Brown) and packager (17th Street Productions) to do? Consider the purpose of a packager: Simply put, they package a title for commercial viability. One theory is that the packager, in an attempt to help Viswanathan suck a little less, put together a guideline for Viswanathan that featured passages from McCafferty's novels. Another theory is that 17th Street, which quite possibly employs ghostwriters, hired a ghostwriter for Viswanathan that may have also worked with McCafferty and lifted passages on purpose ("to subvert the system" says a friend of Maud Newton's, though we don't quite think anyone's that punk rock these days).
Whatever happened here, let's just sum it all up with the obvious: Isn't it kind of awesome to see an overacheiving Indian kid finally do something wrong?
