I mean this as no defense of the author, but I'd be willing to bet that she didn't actually write much of her book. If you read about the whole process by which she was recruited as a writer and then repackaged by a big publishing firm, it seems like it would have been too easy for the book to be manipulated by others. Now, I doubt that Kaavya Viswanathan is blameless in all of this - she had to approve the deal - but the way in which so many passages have been overtly plagiarized seems too hard to believe.
The New York Times has some stuff on how this book was put together:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/27/books/27pack.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1The books' spines bear names like Cecily von Ziegesar, Ann Brashares and, most controversially, since plagiarism charges were leveled against her on Sunday, Kaavya Viswanathan. But on the copyright page — and the contracts — there's an additional name: Alloy Entertainment.
Nobody associated with the plagiarism accusations is pointing fingers at Alloy, a behind-the-scenes creator of some of the hottest books in young-adult publishing. Ms. Viswanathan says that she alone is responsible for borrowing portions of two novels by Megan McCafferty, "Sloppy Firsts" and "Second Helpings." But at the very least, the incident opens a window onto a powerful company with lucrative, if tangled, relationships within the publishing industry that might take fans of series like "The It Girl" by surprise.
In many cases, editors at Alloy — known as a "book packager" — craft proposals for publishers and create plotlines and characters before handing them over to a writer (or a string of writers).
The relationships between Alloy and the publishers are so intertwined that the same editor, Claudia Gabel, is thanked on the acknowledgments pages of both Ms. McCafferty's books and Ms. Viswanathan's "How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life." Ms. Gabel had been an editorial assistant at Crown Publishing Group, then moved to Alloy, where she helped develop the idea for Ms. Viswanathan's book. She has recently become an editor at Knopf Delacorte Dell Young Readers Group, a sister imprint to Crown.
Slate has more @
http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/?nav=tap3he darker moral of her story seems to be that if you succeed by packaging, you can expect to fail by packaging, too—and you alone, not your packagers, will pay the price. McCafferty's publisher, Steve Ross of Crown, has rejected as "disingenuous and troubling" Viswanathan's apology for her "unintentional and unconscious" borrowings from two McCafferty books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, that she says she read and loved in high school. He's right, it doesn't sound like the whole story. I don't mean simply to let Viswanathan off the hook, but her own book—indeed, its very copyright line, Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan—suggests a broader culture of adult-mediated promotion and strategizing at work. It's a culture, as her novel itself shows, that might well leave a teenager very confused about what counts as originality—even a teenager who can write knowingly about just that confusion. In fact, perhaps being able to write so knowingly about derivative self-invention is a recipe for being ripe to succumb to it. Viswanathan may not be a victim, exactly—she's too willing for that—but she is only one of many players here.
Before the scandal hit, Viswanathan emphasized that her own route to Harvard was not as obsessively scripted as Opal's. Still, no one would mistake the fruition of her novel for a case of independent creative genius unfolding. The project got its impetus from none other than Viswanathan's professional college packager. Katherine Cohen, a founder of IvyWise, a premier outfit that choreographs the college application process from ninth grade onward, and, crucially, helps produce essays that convey students' "passions." Working with Viswanathan, Cohen sensed "a star in the making" merely from surveying the teen's writing samples. Just how the publishing deal evolved from there gets a little fuzzy—just as it can be a little hard, often, to say just how a carefully coached college essay evolves, or how, exactly, a particular résumé-enhancing after-school club membership came to be. Whose idea it initially was, how much massaging was involved, what relation the final result bears to the first impulse: Students and consultants alike can find it hard, or uncomfortable, to clarify such matters.
A story a year ago in the New York Sun said Viswanathan's "plot was hatched well before she signed up with Ms. Cohen," and reported that a manuscript went from Cohen's own literary agent at the William Morris Agency to the fiction specialist there, Jennifer Rudolph Walsh, and from her straight to Little, Brown. According to a Boston Globe article of two months ago—which, strangely, comes in the novel's media packet—there was considerably more intervention than that. Several recent articles in the New York Times add more confusing details about a less-than-streamlined process. What the Morris agent saw wasn't "commercially viable" work, the Globe reported. The fiction Cohen saw involved Irish history, a New York Times article noted last month; this week, the sample her agent saw is described as "dark," in "the vein of The Lovely Bones." In any event, Viswanathan was referred to 17th Street Productions, now owned by Alloy Entertainment, which describes itself as "a creative think tank that develops and produces original books, television series and feature films" with a focus on the teen market. Their properties are carefully targeted—and they're not known as showcases of authenticity in the sense that most writers usually mean it. The whole idea is to produce variations on a tried-and-true formula, so perhaps it was no surprise that, according to the Globe, the producers of the "Make Out" and "Gossip Girl" series suggested Viswanathan try something, well, lighter. McCafferty, it's worth noting, is the kind of popular teen author whose cynical-but-smart first-person school daze narratives almost surely get marketers thinking along similar lines.
Rachel Pine at the Huffington Post is kinder than I am, but asks largely the same question:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rachel-pine/is-kaavya-viswanathan-an-_b_19887.htmlOver the past few days, since the story of the alleged plagiarism broke, Ms. Viswanathan has maintained her innocence, saying in a statement, "I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words." She has also apologized, repeatedly, profusely, and to my ears, genuinely. But she also seems at a loss to explain just what happened. In an interview with the New York Times, she said, "I really thought the words were my own; I guess it's just been in my head," she added. "I feel as confused as anyone about it, because it happened so many times."
Could someone as obviously intelligent as Ms. Viswanathan be reduced to an almost fugue-like state when trying to explain how another writer's words wound up in the pages of her own book?
Ms. Viswanathan had a terrific story idea that was quickly seized upon by book packager Alloy Entertainment and Little, Brown, a publisher with which it frequently partners. Not only was her story interesting and fun, Ms. Viswanathan is just the type of author who is very promotable right now. Alloy is a big hitter in the packaging world, best-known for publishing young adult series including "Gossip Girl," "A-List" and "The Clique." Book packagers generally work with publishers by selling them a complete, or "packaged" product, often a series that is credited to one writer but may actually be the work of several.
In light of all this, here's what I can't help but wonder: In the process of editing and rewriting and then more of both, could someone else's hand have entered the picture? Someone who didn't mind lifting another writer's work to help make a deadline?
Viswanathan says that after the first four chapters of "Opal" were sold to Little, Brown, Alloy had no more involvement with it. But who knows what happened between the other parties to the agreement? Consider that the contract for this book is actually between Little, Brown and Alloy, in fact, the copyright designation is shared by Alloy Entertainment and Kaavya Viswanathan. This is unusual for a book that's not being marketed as one of a series or as a "YA" novel.
The whole thing doesn't seem to be adding up. It seems like, whatever talents Viswanathan may have, this book appears to have been written by committee. It seems unlikely that Viswanathan is a wholly innocent bystander, but I would sympathize somewhat if she were manipulated by the publishing industry and then cut loose. Granted, if that was the case, she probably took active participation. But being manipulated and doing something totally out of your own free accord are two different things. It's sad that the publishers thought that something dark and involving Irish history wouldn't sell, so they got her to write (or take part in writing) a contrived piece of teen chic-lit.
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