I’ve been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Kaavya Viswanathan debacle: you know, the 19-year-old Harvard student whose chick-lit novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is being pulled from bookstores because she lifted not just huge passages but huge ideas from the extremely similar novels of Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings. (The book blog Galleycat has some excellent continuing commentary on the whole thing.)
But really, what can I say about an untested teenage writer who gets a half-million-dollar advance on a two-book deal? (It’s not like I’m bitter or anything.) Damn, even if she could write, even if she weren’t a literary thief, that’d be absurd. But she can’t, and she is, and she will eat some crow and mutter some mea culpas and bounce back with a one-million-dollar deal for a book in which she will wail about the unbearable pressures that Indian-American teens are under to succeed, and that’s why she had to steal from someone else -- it’s not her fault, you see. She’s the victim here. (DreamWorks has cancelled the movie version of Opal Mehta that was in the planning stages, but we’re sure to see, at the very least, a made-for-TV drama about Kaavya’s trials and triumphs.)
Since I’ve got nothing to say, let me point you to two Xers with very different takes on the mess: My buddy John Scalzi takes the high road by offering tips and wisdom for teen writers, and it’s stuff that’s actually good advice for all writers: “Being a writer isn't easy; it's a lot of mental effort for often not a lot of financial reward.” Well, unless you're Kaayva Viswanathan. Did she pay back her advance? Bet she didn’t, and won’t.
Meghan Daum, my new favorite Xer columnist, takes a lower road, one I prefer, snarking away, but not without justification, in her Los Angeles Times column:
Now, Kaavya totally does not seem like the kind of person to do something like that. She goes to Harvard! But the weird thing is that "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings" happen to be two of her favorite books ever. McCafferty, who had to wait until she was 28 to get a book published, was hugely inspiring to Kaavya when Kaavya was growing up. When Kaavya goes on "The Today Show" to try to fix everything, Katie Couric is super harsh with her. Then on Thursday her publisher pulls "Opal" off bookstore shelves. Oh. My. God.Long story short, Kaavya must be massively freaking out. Not only is the situation 1) totally embarrassing but 2) she's now not even sure herself how this happened. She says that "any phrasing similarities were unintentional and unconscious…. I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words."
In other words, it's not that Kaavya was copying. It's just that she was so influenced by these books that it was like McCafferty's words became a part of her. It's kind of like when you're going out with a guy who's really into surfing and then suddenly you're all into surfing without meaning to be. But a lot of people think that's majorly bogus. I mean, 1) only a total loser with no core self would accidentally get into surfing because of some guy and 2) can you really "unconsciously internalize" something and then accidentally copy it almost verbatim in your own book?
Gag me with a chick-lit paperback.
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