Many of you have already picked up on the story broken by the Harvard Crimson on Sunday. It appears VERY likely that young author Kaavya Viswanathan is a cheat. Her newly released novel, part of a lucrative two-book deal, has several passages that are almost identical to a 2001 novel that examined similar adolescent themes:
A recently-published novel by Harvard undergraduate Kaavya Viswanathan ’08, “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” contains several passages that are strikingly similar to two books by Megan F. McCafferty–the 2001 novel “Sloppy Firsts” and the 2003 novel “Second Helpings.”
At one point, “Opal Mehta” contains a 14-word passage that appears verbatim in McCafferty’s book “Sloppy Firsts.”
Reached on her cell phone Saturday night, Viswanathan said, “No comment. I have no idea what you are talking about.”
McCafferty, the author of three novels and a former editor at the magazine Cosmopolitan, wrote in an e-mail to The Crimson Saturday night: “I’m already aware of this situation, and so is my publisher…” [Link]
Normally I would be skeptical until I heard more about this, but the Crimson has just broken it down to the point where you know how this is all going to end. Her literary career is over. If I were her I would think about falling back on medical school or something real quick. I was thrilled to see a teenage girl that could still write and didn’t use “u” instead of “you,” or “r” instead of “are.” My hopes for the next generation are now completely dashed. Here are just two of the numerous examples of apparent plagiarism cited by the Crimson:
From page 217 of McCafferty’s first novel: “But then he tapped me on the shoulder, and said something so random that I was afraid he was back on the junk.”
From page 142 of Viswanathan’s novel: “…he tapped me on the shoulder and said something so random I worried that he needed more expert counseling than I could provide…”From page 237 of McCafferty’s first novel: “Finally, four major department stores and 170 specialty shops later, we were done.”
From page 51 of Viswanathan’s novel: “Five department stores, and 170 specialty shops later, I was sick of listening to her hum along to Alicia Keys……” [Link]
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Reading the Crimson article inspired me to do some investigative blogging of my own and has led me to a fantastic discovery which I would like to reveal first to SM readers (an then later to the world press). Aided by SM staff I have found striking similarities between the novel “How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life,” and the 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail by authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh. For example, if you take the name of the main character, “Opal Mehta,” and you rearrange the letters, it gives you the following phrase:
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p>I think somewhere in Holy Blood, Holy Grail they mention that “a pale moth” is one of the symbols associated with the female divinity, a symbol that was suppressed in the 6th century by the papacy. On a previous post we all wondered why the title character would be named “Opal Mehta” of all things. It makes sense to me now.
Furthermore, I have reason to believe that Kaavya Viswanathan may not even be her real name. Rearranging the letters in her name gives you:
Roughly translated this seems to mean that Satan stays away from wherever the Ankh is displayed (the ankh being an ancient symbol that some believe is the precursor to the Christian cross). This again is a theme that Baigent and Leigh discuss in their non-fiction book. Before the Harvard Crimson article I would have just thought that “maybe this is all a coincidence,” and this really is just a book about a teenage girl that she created from her imagination. I am sure that you all agree in light of the evidence that I have just laid out that this is highly unlikely. This girl simply has no conscience.
See related posts: How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and…, The narcissist principle
Her literary career is over.
A PhD in Earth Sciences is always an option.
God, almost every newspaper all over the world has picked the story – check Google news.
Another example of “model minority”.
I think she might be asked to do some real damage control.
KT aka Stephen Ambrose
I finally commented in the other Opal/Kaavya thread, and just 2 seconds later you post this!
Yeah, I’m sure she did crib from the other book to help her along. And I do take it seriously.
For $500,000 the author should be doing honest work, and good work by any standard – it is so rare for any author to get a deal like this, and plenty of excellent authors do not get compensated like this for their work.
Now the Holy Blood/Holy Grail connection? Well, how else do you expect Baigent and Leigh to pay off their million-pound debt from losing their lawsuit? 😉
And why the caveat? For $500,000 should there be an extensive group of handlers shaping her work? She gets the credit for any merit attached to the book – she should take the blame for any plagiarism.
That’s true. I’ll remove the caveat.
So who thinks she’ll get kicked out of Harvard? My guess: She won’t get kicked out because of the novel. Either they’ll find that she plagiarized in her academic work, or the other students will make her life so miserable that she’ll have to leave.
No, I don’t think they’ll kick her out, either.
Seeing that this is a more appropriate posting, I have to plagiarize myself from the other post. Even then, I feel the need to use quotes 😉
“This is even more sinister than Opal’s character, who lives and breathes Harvard and does all the right things to get in: If the allegations are founded, it seems this young author has decided that perceived success is all that matters – not the journey – and to take whatever means necessary to get to that status of perceived success. I’m not impressed!
ps. I hope she gets the counselling and help she needs to get her through and past, what will be undoubtedly, a very trying time. Moreover, I hope she gets help dealing with whatever moved her to plagiarize in the first place.’
….and became best friends with James Frey.
laughing silently
Abhi, not sure if, by bringing up Holy Blood, Holy Grail, you intended to make a point about coincidences and how easily all cliched writing can sound suspiciously similar. If so, I rather agree.
But something smells fishy here, and while I feel sorry for the poor teenager who (total speculation) is/was caught up in all sorts of pressures and expectations, there’s a smell of hubris around anyone who gets this much money based on zero experience. Additionally, a commenter in another thread raised the specter of packaging companies…she might not have known that her name was slapped on some regurgutated drivel, in which case I blame parents and publishers, along with the ambitiously precocious young lass.
No matter what, I’ve got my bag of popcorn and plan on watching this to the end 😉
This brown sister needs our help.. i say she is being unfairly targetted. She was merely inspired from those books and it was her way of paying homage to them 🙂 :p
Don’t worry Opal I will organize a rally on your behalf.
P.S: Can you add me as your friend on orkut/facebook…
I meant Kaavya… see I m so agitated by all this that I forgot who the author was.
P.S: Can you at least email me a pic =)
Cicatrix, I am not sure if you intended to dismiss my investigative blogging skills and are ignoring the fact that the word “Satan” is clearly in her name. 🙂
The Crimson looks solid. She looks guilty.
You blinded me with science, Abhi 😉
You are a supersleuth, nonpareil. (In all definitions of the term: smart, brown and with sprinkles!)
While I stick by my contention that, in general, coincidences are easy to find in the world of cliche-riddled genre writing….I agree that there’s too much here to dismiss. I rather expected something weird to turn up since everything about this deal seemed so odd… but I’m almost disappointed that it’s as pedestrian as plagiarism. I still expected her to be too smart for something like this.
Kush, Google News now turns up 99 articles. Damn, this girl’s going to get friend.
I’m slightly concerned about the fallout from this on other young desi writers trying to get published…
Damn, this girl’s going to get fried, I meant.
(damn tyeops)
I’m slightly concerned about the fallout from this on other young desi writers trying to get published…
Ages ago, when I was young and bright, I once sat on the “Code of Academic Integrity Council” at Cornell as a student member for a case where a graduate student had used somebody’s work along with his and not acknowledged them as co-authors in a conference abstract. I kept mostly quiet in the whole preceedings except 1-2 sentences as it had some world class mathematicians discussing the case with utmost concern. The reason I am telling the story that people/ academics take plagarism very seriously – it is an honor system.
On grander scheme of things, Opalgate is a far more serious case than one I talked above. I do not think she should be crucfied but ask to take concrete remedial actions by Harvard. I do not think it will affect desi writers but the yuppie young brown ones a little bit who are on fast-forward stardom.
Even for “Life of Pie“, all the charge was that his story seemed inspired by a similar earlier story. Or even “Da Vinci Code” as Abhi has indirectly alluded in the post. Even for Stepen Ambrose, it is slightly more complicated for a historian not doing original research. Or for that matter, JFK’s “Profiles in Courage“
She seems to picking up sentences and changing few words here and there.
it is a quick fall for a wanna be writer… too bad, so sad..and she is not being pin pointed because she is brown… she is being pointed out because she plagiarized… as i stated before harvard check out her college application.. i’m sure that the honor code might have been broken there too…
it’s ‘how kaavya viswanathan got freyed…’
can you imagine the wrath she would face if she had gone on oprah? people magazine as a few other high profile sources already wrote about her debut book….
abhi:
taken aback by your statement: If I were her I would think about falling back on medical school or something real quick.
i’m sorry..but being a physician i felt angst and anger at that statement… you just don’t fall back into medicine…. fine, cheat while writing a book (that still doesn’t bode well with me and tons more other folks)….but you can’t when caring for a human life… that is purely just satanical…and will truly hurt someone… her character (or lack of) has dimly shown it’s true colors…and they are not pretty…
i’d tell her to fall back into her pot of $500,000 and hope it softens her fall…because ms. viswanathan..it’s going to be a long arse ride…dreamworks, and the people who gave you that cash will come a knocking shortly at your door.. let’s hope she didn’t spend it already…
this is so vindictive… read the passages again. i’d say she was inspired. how far can you differ in chick lit anyway? it’s not like she ripped off shakespeare.
Schadenfreude is always a little distasteful.
That the passages are pasted and reworded seems clear from the quotes released so far. The question is, did some Alloy hack do it, or did she do it herself? Smells bad either way. If it’s Alloy’s fault, it lays bare a possibly manufactured, boy band-like collaboration. If Viswanathan’s…
Silver lining: America learns to spell Viswanathan 🙂
Have mercy, I’m the worst, cruelest bitch there is, but even I am a little queasy at all this joy over another’s downfall. I was jealous of her, too, but I don’t wish this kind of gleeful hatred on anyone, especially when we aren’t exactly sure who is responsible for this.
This blog is absolutely hysterical!
this is such a contrast from this article interviewing her in ‘the hindu’ ironically published yesterday…and in it she says:
These days my dad has appointed himself my business manager — which, in his mind, means he reads every article and blog written about me and passes it on to me even if I don’t want to read it.
hence sepia mutiny and a few other blogs will be in her email as i type this…
and this:
How are your parents dealing with the attention you’ve been getting in the U.S. and India?
They are proud of what I’ve done but they are also wonderfully nuts and eccentric about it too. When it started, my parents were trying to handle it in the typical traditional Indian fashion — Play it down. Beware of the “evil eye”. But now things have changed. The day the book was released, my mom went driving around Bergen County (in New Jersey where they live) visiting every Barnes and Noble and buying my book at every store
it’s pretty tragic at the downfall.. and no it’s not a gleeful thing to point out…but facts are facts… and whoever is responsible, whether it be an editor, or someone else….i guess that ‘evil eye’ she alluded to above opened… sad…
She ought to get in touch with Dan Brown’s lawyer…
I canÂ’t help but feel for her. We all do phenomenally dumb things in uni, her mistake is just painfully public.
Time for a new book perhaps? “Kaavya Vishwanathan probably copied, probably got rich and probably gets sued”
i agree with anna, brown- schadenfreude, stop now.
unless its funny, then its all good.
I agree with Cicatrix. I think the pressures of such a high-profile deal got to the author, her parents and/or her publisher and packager.
She admitted in several of her early interviews that she has no literary career aspirations, but plans a career in investment banking.
I usually don’t buy this defense, but she really was just a kid when she wrote the book, and, as Pooja said, has no literary aspirations and probably didn’t expect this to blow up so successfully the way it did.
I just feel sort of bad for her. She made a mistake and the fallout will hurt.
I’ve actually read both of McCafferty’s books and to be honest I’m not that impressed with these charges. It’s obvious Kaavya lifted some sentence structures straight out of the text but other than that the stories are completely different. Plagiarism is a serious violation of the honor code but both authors were trying to write in the language of a teenager. A teenage girl, at that.
I’m kind of surprised that her publishers didn’t check for this sort of thing. Especially with a first time author.
The Boston Globe has the story here.
I dont get it. So what if the two novels are written about similar themes and similar subjects??? Is this the first time someone wrote about a teenagers life?? Whats the f#$%ing big deal??
Like I have said earlier … since there is no scientific way to compare works of literature, its just a matter of marketing !!!
Nobody says anything about Rushdie’s new novel, that sounds a copy of the movie “Mission Kashmir” … WTF
To echo RC and others… are you all for real? Is the Crimson and its distinguished faculty expert for real? If that’s the best that they come up with in terms of examples…
The reasons these types of novels resonate is because yes, they reflect the “voice” that many young girls of a certain mindset are. These are not original ideas here, the phrasing is innovative or creative. Unless… OK, Megan McCafferty is a cheat! She plagiarised my little cousin sister’s journal entries!!
And so what if it turns out that Kaavya Vishwanathan had read those books after all? When I read something — usually powerful, sometimes it doesn’t have to be — it resonates through me… the ideas and/or the words imprint themselves on my thinking. And if part of Kaavya “channeling” this Opal character hit on something she had read before… how would she even know that’s what her brain was really coughing up?
I mean, how do infants acquire language? How do students learn to write essays? How do people learn anything? Through experience, and by reading others’ experiences… and by intaking others’ words and making them a part of their own minds. Can you trace every single concept or sentence or idea you’ve ever created to its sources and influences?
I’m waiting for the day when they can use an artifical neural net. to give some scientific cred. to these things…
To play the cliche’s advocate, several men have tapped me on the shoulder and said something so random I worried he was back on the Wild Turkey/crack/XBox and needed more expert counseling than I could provide.
However, the issue of precisely 170 specialty shops bothers me. Girl …
She says it better than I can:
Er…a few very generic lines in a vapid piece of chick-lit taken from another vapid piece of chick-lit doth not plagiarism make…methinks. People use language like this all the time, so it’s not like the Dan Brown case.
I think it’s very easy for a first-time writer (esp one so young) to be strongly influenced by another one, even subconsciously. Yeah, we were all upset she was making that kinda money, but I wouldn’t wish this kinda hate on anyone either.
a few of you have compared her to Dan Brown — I haven’t read DaVinci Code but I strongly condemn it because I am a literary snob and refuse to spend time on books that read like a screen play. But I made my little brother read and he said it was “good” but agreed it read like a movie script.
Have any of you Da Vinci Code critics/fans read Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco? Dan Brown is like Eco for Dummies — both books deal with the occult science, secret societies, wolrd domination — but Foucault’s Pendulum is actually written for grown-ups!
Anyway — if you’ve read both — what are your impressions? Also, have nay of you read the Celestine Prophecy? Another book I can’t stand. The two pages I read of DaVinci sound like it was wriiten by a similar hack of a writer.
Also, Kite Runner — important work but the writing was awful. I think a lot people get a freebie for who they are (first afghan novelist wiritng about afghanistan) rather than the quality of their work (ok, the story was emotional but the writing was just garbage). I asked above whether Kaavya might fall into that category. I cannot imagine that a truly talented writer would plagerize. Down with Kaavya! i have no sympathy.
To balance out the negativity in this post, one of my all time favorite books is A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry — now that is powerful storytelling and quality writing. Several pages are wrinkled from big salty tears.
Cicatrix (#14), Bharati (#21), your snide remarks about the inevitability of cliche and repetition in genre fiction really irk me, insofar as you endorse a hierarchy in which literary fiction hovers at the apex — despite the fact that “literary fiction” itself is a genre, and certainly one that neither Shakespeare nor Dickens would have recognized. Add to that the fact that these days, the label “literary fiction” gets slapped upon some of the sloppiest, most uninspired, pretentious, and painfully trite novels to ever exit the Great Publishing Halls of America, and I’d say that popular fiction is the blood and marrow of fiction today. Not surprising, really, when it has always produced the most popular, beloved, and enduring writers — like those two aforementioned folks, S & D.
This could be for the better for her. The novel is worse than tubgirl. If I had produced such terrible writing and content, I’d want to be caught for plagiarism, and turn myself in for it even if innocent, just because it would be a step up from actually having written that drivel myself.
What is wrong with hierarchy? Are you telling me that Moby Dick is not a better novel than the Da Vinci Code?
Says who? Literary fiction is not a genre, it is an approach to literature as an art form that rejects cliche and seeks to say things with freshness and an attention to language and form.
Huh? Shakespeare and Dickens would not have recognised good literary art from bad?
What are you doing? Are you discriminating between good and bad writing – you mean you are….setting up a hierarchy in literature? gasps of horror
You elitist.
So Shakespeare and Dickens being popular in their day means they were ‘popular fiction’ and not ‘literary fiction’? Dan Brown is the inheritor of the mantle of Charles Dickens and not someone like Salman Rushdie or Vladimir Nabokov or Muriel Spark? All of whom are great literary artists as well as being popular with the reading public? I think you need to get back to me on this Simmie.
Espressa
I have read Eco’s book, and loved it. It is a much more erudite book, with intense discussions on theology and philosophy, but a fundamentally similar plot: Templars and Freemasons being a secret society guarding documents which shake the foundations of Christianity.
The only difference is that Dan Brown’s book is better timed, coming as it does after the unveiling of the Gnostic Gospels, whereas Eco’s book was based on a completely fictional conspiracy theory.
That being said, I agree with you about books which are written with the movie in mind…
For Cicatrix:
More about the ‘packaging’ of Opal/Kaavya from GalleyCat.
Chick Pea, it was just humor. Most of the desis reading this (most of whom were once pre-med) know that medical school isn’t a fallback. I was using subtle humor to compare the pressure she must have been under to do this sort of thing to the pressure Indian parents often put on their kids to go to med school.
espressa, Da Vinci code did have piss poor writing, particularly the conversation between characters. It was popular because of the little puzzles and historical intrigue within it. The “non-fiction” parts of the book is what draws people in. Plus it is a quick read. I finished 80% on a flight from LA to DC.
I’ve considered the whole subconcious argument, but it hasn’t convinced me. If a work inspired me to paraphrase so closely, I think I would know it.. unless it was a brothers grimm tale that I read as a kid 20ish years ago, or some kind of universal metaphor. If she read those books, she read them less than 5 years ago. And then, the similarities in the passages seems deliberately reworded in some parts, while the 170 specialty shops is pretty much a give-away.
Bear with me for a moment: If you were going to plagiarize, wouldn’t you change the number (170) of “specialty shops”? And if the similarities end at reworded (though pretty unmistakenly – not just subconciously – paraphrased) passages, why take a few passages that probably don’t even affect the plot? Those passages aren’t even that great or special. I don’t get it. Maybe, under pressure with school and this HUGE book deal, she hired someone to help write the book, and they wanted her to get caught for who-knows-what-reason. Maybe this is some kind of set-up. Everything seems so extreme and surreal – from the unusual half-mil signing to the downfall. I know it sounds crazy, but why else would she so obviously plagiarize inconsequential passages from Megan’s pretty popular books?!? She has to be smarter than this, and that’s why I feel there could be something else at play here.
If there is anything that goes unquestioned, this is a young woman who felt alot of pressure. I hope she can get this sorted out. There’s still room to fulfill her goal of becoming an investment banker.
I can’t believe she stole the “170 specialty stores later” clause verbatim. If you’re going to plagiarize, at least change the numbers around! Every English major in the world knows that…
That is the other thing. Why in the HELL would a high school senior go to college dreaming of investment banking? Have you ever met an IBer that wasn’t burned out and hated that they worked 90 hours a week? This makes me even more suspicious 🙂
technophobicgeek — just to clarify, while i loved Foucault’s Pendulum, it took me three years to get through, flanked on both sides by encylopedias, and I still understood only about 12% of it. If you followed even half of the occult reference, I am AMAZED.
Abhi — read Foucault’s Pendulum. There’s a LOT of arcane history and while you might, at first, be tempted to keep up, you should let it pass and just enjoy the soryline, imagery, and charaters. Its one of those books you can read again and again and always find somehting you didnt notice before.
self — stop posting, go to class.