Literary Paper Lions

Book packagers, drunken exaggerations, hoaxes: Why do we still expect authenticity from bestsellers?

Tim Cavanaugh from the July 2006 issue

p class="CRlargetext-1stpgrph"> Kaavya Viswanathan span class="c1">was riding high in April, shot down in May. The Harvard sophomore’s debut novel— How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life , for which she had received a $500,000 advance at the age of 17—was moving up the bestseller lists. The chick-lit book detailed the struggles of an Indian-American high-school girl trying to maintain a social life and get into the Ivy League. Opal Mehta ’s apparently autobiographical story—celebrated in The New York Times , USA Today , and many other venues—was making Viswanathan a media sensation, a model of the kind of deranged precocity that Harvard increasingly demands of its students. Then in late April The Harvard Crimson revealed that Viswanathan had plagiarized more than a dozen passages from two young adult books by Megan McCafferty.