PODCASTS / NICHOLAS QUAH - Reading the Fine Print

Missing Pages goes full true crime on the book-publishing industry.

In 2006, two years after Facebook’s founding and shortly before the radical degradation of the books business owing to corporate consolidation and the age of the internet giants, a Harvard sophomore was accused of plagiarism—not in a college paper but in a young-adult novel, one that the student, Kaavya Viswanathan, had scored a widely publicized half-million-dollar publishing deal to write.

It was an astonishing rise and fall. What began with mythology building publicity, budding stardom, and energetic sales rapidly evaporated in scandal after the Harvard Crimson published a story finding that chunks of Viswanathan’s book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, appeared to be lifted from entries in a YA series by Megan McCafferty that had come out a few years earlier. (Also identified were passages that seemed to pull from other authors, including Meg Cabot and Salman Rushdie.) In a televised interview with Katie Couric, Viswanathan acknowledged the similarities but claimed any cribbing was unintentional. The situation spiraled. Further printings of the book were ceased, a planned film adaptation was scuttled, and Viswanathan’s public reputation was left in ruins. When her parents perished five years later, the headline from Gawker, which had extensively covered the mess, read “Parents of Harvard’s Chick-Lit Plagiarist Die in Plane Crash.”