12:05 am - How Opal Mehta Got Herself Into Some Deep Shit

I've somewhat abandoned my policy of not caring about famous people to follow the story of Kaavya Viswanathan's (right, being smug) steady demise from wonder-kid author to hack plagiarist. What a long, completely unsurprising trip it's been. If you don't know what I'm talking about and would like to, try this most recent story, or this one, or this quite comprehensive collection (you'll have to start at the bottom).

I don't have much to say about her borrowing of other author's materials. Obviously, it sucks, and she should have known better. I'm mostly confused as to why she even needed to do it in the first place. Aren't writers supposed to just... um, write? Why couldn't she just write the book? I seriously don't get it.

I picture this girl settling down in the Harvard library with all the horrible chick-lit books she copied from for another long night of cutting and pasting pieces of them together like an arts and crafts project (albeit one contracted for $500,000). Who would do this? How is this writing? Why would a company want to pay this girl in the first place?

Don't worry, I know the answers to all of those questions, because I (sort of) understand how the world works. It's just depressing.

Apparently this girl (I'm so sick of her name that I'm not gonna use it) has excelled mostly in math and science her whole life. Which isn't to say that she couldn't be a good writer. I have nothing against anyone who wants to be a writer trying to be a writer. (Honey, please.) But what pisses me off the most about this girl is that, in character with the rest of her analytical, purpose-driven life, she treated the construction of her novel like a mathematical equation, copying passages from other books nearly word-for-word in an effort to make the project as commercially successful as possible. Like a math problem, it could have one correct answer: a huge profit.

I picture her thinking of the writing process almost like a cheesy high school essay contest with the topic "County Pride" or something, in which the student who injects her rhetoric with the most names of locally revered diners or words like "community" and "nationalism" might win $100 and her photo in the American Leigon's headquarters for one glorious calendar year. It seems that writing the most popular novel ever was something this girl just decided to do as a self-imposed extra-credit project to tack onto her roster of accomplishments, even though she wasn't competing against anyone in particular, and even though the world certainly didn't need another astoundingly annoying book of fluff.

What resulted was, in essence, a blueprint instead of a narrative. SIMPLISTIC DIALOGUE + FASHION DESIGNER NAME-DROPPING + OTHER AUTHOR'S PARAGRAPH SKELETONS = MY AWESOME BOOK. Yay! She'd certainly won. For a few days, at least.

I saw Katie Couric interview this girl a few weeks ago on The Today Show, before any of the cheating stuff broke. I'd been up all night and for the most part was neither lucid nor listening to their blatantly scripted discussion. The only thing I remember is glancing up at the screen in horrifying recognition of something very clear: "This girl's an idiot!" I said out loud to my TV. It wasn't in a mean or dismissive or jealous tone, except for maybe that last one. More like crestfallen. Like "Oh, that's really too bad." I was mostly just disappointed -- that what was obivously a shallow book would become a hit, something the herds would race to buy, plow through, and discuss at book club weeks or months later... and all because a teenager with shiny hair and a fun, ethnic but not too ethnic accent happened to "write" it.

We can't do any better than her? Seriously?

Ew.