Harvard Plagiarist's Teen Genre Explores Sex, Angst

Harvard Plagiarist's Teen Genre Explores Sex, Angst
By Lisa Kassenaar
Bloomberg, May 5, 2006

At a Borders book shop on Park Avenue in Manhattan, titles for teenagers cram 30 shelves, with ``The True Meaning of Cleavage'' vying for buyers with ``Vegan Virgin Valentine'' and ``You Are SO Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah!''

The plots are often similar: a girl with social anxiety struggles and learns a lesson before snagging success at school or with a boy. The genre, known as ``teen chick lit,'' helped lift the number of U.S. juvenile-fiction books sold last year by 20 percent over 2004, to 131 million, as adult fiction rose 5 percent to 192 million, according to Nielsen BookScan.

This is the lucrative niche that latched onto Kaavya Viswanathan, 19, the India-born Harvard University student whose publisher last week recalled her novel, ``How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got a Life,'' amid plagiarism accusations. She was led to the business by a college admissions consultant, an agent and a book ``packager,'' and editors may have liked her profile as much as the stories.

``I can see any book editor drooling at the prospect of signing up a culturally exotic prodigy and hanging onto her,'' says Valerie Frankel, 41, a novelist whose first foray into teen chick lit, ``Fringe Girl,'' came out last month from New American Library. ``What book editor wouldn't be all over her?''

Viswanathan, who grew up in northern New Jersey, the daughter of two doctors, glowed in the publicity surrounding her 311-page first effort, published in April by Little, Brown & Co., a unit of New York-based Time Warner Inc. The book chronicles a New Jersey girl's effort to get into Harvard to fulfill her Indian parents' lifelong wish.

Hit Machines

That success ended on May 2 when Little, Brown Senior Vice President Michael Pietsch issued a one-sentence statement saying his company ``will not be publishing a revised edition of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan, nor will we publish the second book under contract.''

Viswanathan didn't return calls and e-mails seeking comment. Neither she nor Pietsch has said whether she will keep her advance, which Little, Brown hasn't disclosed.

At 17, the writer received a two-book advance, which the Boston Globe said totaled $500,000. Viacom Inc.'s DreamWorks SKG took a movie option.

``The competition is fierce for writers who are incredibly marketable and can create a brand,'' says Michael Norris, a senior analyst at Simba Information Inc., a publishing industry research company in Stamford, Connecticut.

Viswanathan offered her publisher the appealing combination of life as a teen, Harvard student, and Indian-American, he says.

`Fell in Love'

She found her way to teen chick lit and a book contract through Katherine Cohen of IvyWise LLC, a Manhattan firm hired by her parents to help get her into college. Cohen introduced her to Suzanne Gluck, her own agent, and Jennifer Rudolph Walsh at the William Morris Agency LLC in New York.

``I read her journalistic writing, her poetry, her fiction and they were all brilliant,'' says Cohen. ``My agent said `Bring her in.' By the end of the meeting, they fell in love with her.''

Teen chick lit, with titles including ``The Earth, My Butt and Other Big Round Things,'' and ``But I Don't Want to be a Movie Star,'' exploded about four years ago when publishers saw they weren't serving mature teen girls with traditional fiction or with grown-up romances, Norris says.

The books are typically written by women in their 30s and 40s who adapt their own teen experiences.


Rising Market

Companies such as Little, Brown and Simon & Schuster Inc., a unit of New York-based CBS Corp., don't release separate revenue or profit data for teen chick lit. Still, they are driving sales through author Web sites, personal appearances and with reviews in magazines such as Conde Nast Publications Inc.'s Teen Vogue.

The publishers are focusing on U.S. girls from age 12 to 17. That group spends an average of $47 a week, with about 87 percent getting the money from parents, according to a 2005 survey of 1,366 kids by Media, Pennsylvania-based International Communications Research.

``It's a rising market,'' says Michael Cader, who runs PublishersMarketplace.com, a Manhattan-based news and information site for the industry.

Since amateur sleuth Nancy Drew debuted in the 1930s, girls have been keen for stories tracing a heroine through many adventures and torments. Writers add to their value by creating characters that will support a series of books as well as related DVDs, calendars, notebooks and make-up.

Bulimia, Sex

Story lines have changed through the decades, with crime solving and summer-camp high jinks giving way to sex and shopping. The ``Gossip Girl'' books, with a ninth installment
coming out this month, describe the lives of teens in an Upper East Side private school who wear designer clothes, drink cosmopolitans at hotel bars, cope with bulimia and have sex.

In the first book, ``Gossip Girl'' (Little, Brown, 2002), Pucci-clad Serena Van der Woodsen returns to Manhattan after her expulsion. On page 122, she explains:

```The only reason I got kicked out was because I didn't show up at the beginning of school. I stayed in France. My parents didn't even know...

```There were these two boys, an older brother and a younger one, and I was totally in love with both of them. Actually,'' she laughed, ``I was even more in love with their father, but he was married.'''

The book's paperback edition has sold 385,000 copies since its release in 2002, according to BookScan, which doesn't include sales at food and drug stores or at Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world's biggest retailer. BookScan is owned by VNU NV, the media company based in Haarlem, the Netherlands.

Bridget Jones

Teen chick lit evolved out of a broader category called chick lit, whose seminal novel was Helen Fielding's ``Bridget Jones's Diary'' (Macmillan Publishers Ltd., 1996), the comic story of a working girl looking for love and career success in London. The book inspired two movies starring Renee Zellweger.

The `Bridget Jones' phenomenon spawned thousands of novels about women in their 20s and 30s dealing with jobs, men, kids and their offbeat friends. The books include: ``The Accidental Bride,'' ``The Accidental Diva,'' and ``The Accidental Virgin.''

Other titles appearing in the past few years: ``Babe in Toyland,'' ``Babes in Captivity,'' ``Baby Baby,'' ``Babyface,'' ``Babyland,'' and ``Babyville.''

``It's getting hard to keep track,'' says Rian Montgomery, 28, who started chicklitbooks.com three years ago, a Web site that reviews the novels as they come out. ``There used to be only five or six a month. Now it's 15.''

Multiculturalism

Montgomery reads about 90 chick lit books a year, and her Web site gets 1,200 visitors a day, she says. As titles increased, she added sections for teen chick lit, Christian chick lit, Bigger Girl chick lit and multicultural chick lit.

In the last category, books for Indian, Asian and Latina girls speak to readers blending American pop culture with households that maintain home-country traditions.

In Kim Wong Keltner's ``Buddha Baby'' (Avon, 2005), a follow up to ``The Dim Sum of All Things'' (Avon, 2004), a young Chinese woman in San Francisco struggles with whether she should date white or Asian guys.

``There is a real emphasis on multiculturalism in the teen market,'' says Frankel. ``The characters of these books reflect that.''

The characters also reflect U.S. demographics. About 19 percent of the class that Harvard has accepted for next year, for example, is made up of foreign students, dual citizens or U.S. permanent residents, according to the school. Asian-Americans will make up about 18 percent of those accepted.

Harvard-Bound Toddler

Viswanathan's book focuses on Opal, a high-school nerd whose parents laid out a strategy for her to get into Harvard when she was a toddler. Opal took cello at age 5 and four foreign language classes at 6. She does physics for fun.

The struggle begins when a Harvard interviewer says Opal needs to mix a social life with top test scores to get a spot at the prestigious Cambridge, Massachusetts, school.

The book has similar passages to two by Megan McCafferty, ``Sloppy Firsts,'' (Random House, 2001) and ``Second Helpings'' (Random House, 2003). Those stories focus on a New Jersey teen dealing with high school and her Ivy League ambition.

At least 45 examples of similar writing are in the books, according to a compilation by Crown Publishing, an arm of Random House Inc. on PublishersMarketplace.com. Among them, page 183 of McCafferty's ``Sloppy Firsts'' says:

`Omigod!'

```Omigod! Let's make sure junior year rocks,'' she says. ``Let's make more time for each other. Friends are forever!''

`I don't want anything to do with Bridget, Manda, Sara, and the S.O.S. So I say even less at lunch than usual, totally aware of how alone I am.'

And on page 161 of Viswanathan's book:

```Omigod!'' Stacie had finished reapplying her face. ``We have to make more time for each other. Friends are forever!''

`I said even less than usual, aware of how totally alone I was.'

The comparisons were initially reported by the Harvard Crimson student newspaper on April 23. Viswanathan apologized to McCafferty and told the Crimson that she had read and ``internalized'' McCafferty's work and the similarities between phrases was unintentional.

Little, Brown, which recalled the 55,000 copies of ``Opal'' that it had shipped, canceled Viswanathan's book deal this week after the New York Times reported the book contained similarities to more works by other writers. The Harvard Crimson identified the new authors as Meg Cabot, Sophie Kinsella and Salman Rushdie.

Jessica Darling

McCafferty, in a statement, says she won't seek ``restitution'' in any form. Crown and Random House spokeswoman Tina Constable declined to comment.

Harvard's plagiarism policies only apply to course work, and the school is gathering information about Viswanathan, says spokesman Robert Mitchell. He declined to comment further.

McCafferty, 33, lives in Princeton, New Jersey, and is a former Cosmopolitan magazine editor who last month added a third novel to her series of two books from which Viswanathan had used similar language.

``Charmed Thirds'' (Random House, 2006) takes McCafferty's character, Jessica Darling, from high school to Manhattan's Columbia University while her love interest heads to a Buddhist college in California. McCafferty, who edited a short story anthology in 2004 called ``Sixteen: Stories About That Sweet and Bitter Birthday,'' is writing the fourth book in the Jessica Darling series, about the main character's first year after college.

IvyWise

The author stays close to readers through a Web site that invites e-mail conversation and lists her public appearances, a typical teen chick lit marketing technique.

MeganMcCafferty.com also includes the writer's personal diary entries since 1983 when she was 10. Fans can look up her jelly bean Halloween costume and reflections on singer Michael Jackson winning nine American Music Awards in 1984.

Viswanathan, an English major who wants to be a banker, wasn't unknown to major publications before her book came out.

As a student at Bergen County Academy in Hackensack, New Jersey, she was quoted in a Forbes magazine article on private counseling services like IvyWise.

IvyWise's services can cost more than $30,000 and include guiding a child as young as 14 toward classes, awards and performances that will impress college admissions departments.

Viswanathan was also featured in a 2004 essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In it, she speaks of sending monthly messages to the admissions officers at nine colleges, including Harvard and Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut.

`Strategy'

``I think a lot of applying to college is about strategy,'' Viswanathan says in the piece. The article notes she scored 1560 out of a possible 1600 on the SAT college entrance examination.

In July, she wrote a 1,012-word op-ed piece in the New York Times about her admiration for J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter saga.

Like Opal's parents in the novel, Viswanathan's father is a neurosurgeon who drives a Range Rover and her mother is a doctor who gave up medicine. Viswanathan spent summers at a program for talented kids run by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University and
began writing the book the summer before college, the New York Times reported in an April 6 profile before the plagiarism arose. She lived in the U.K. before moving to New Jersey.

Viswanathan had not signed her book contract when submitting her application to Harvard in November 2003, though she did include her William Morris representation, Cohen says.

`Gossip Girl'

Walsh, the agent, connected Viswanathan to Alloy Entertainment, which pulls together writers and ideas and shops a refined ``package'' to publishers and movie houses. Cecily von Ziegesar, who wrote the ``Gossip Girl'' books, and Ann Brashares, author of ``The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants,'' (Delacourt, 2001) another top-selling teen chick lit series with a movie released last summer, are both former editors at the company.

Alloy holds a share of the Opal book's copyright and probably shared the advance, says Cader of PublishersMarketplace.com. If the advance was $500,000, the author would only have received about $100,000 to date, Cader says. The agent may have received a 15 percent commission.

Alloy spokeswoman Jodi Smith declined to comment. Paramount Pictures spokeswoman Jessica Rovins, whose company includes Dreamworks, didn't return a message seeking comment on whether Viswanathan's book would proceed toward being made into a movie. William Morris spokesman Chris Petrikin didn't return calls.

`She's a Kid'

Book packaging companies come up with their own ideas for a book or series, or have a potential author bring them the concept, says Lizzie Skurnick, an editor at Girls' Life Magazine who once worked for GLC, a subsidiary of 17th Street Productions, which is now called Alloy.

Skurnick, 32, has ghost-written 10 books for the teen series Sweet Valley High. Hiring teens to write for their peers isn't common in the industry, she says.

Cader met Viswanathan at a luncheon for new authors thrown by Little, Brown this year at an Italian restaurant in midtown Manhattan, he says. She arrived after interviews for summer internships that morning at Wall Street firms, he says she told him.

``She said she loved writing but didn't feel she would pursue a professional writing career after college,'' he says.

Other writers say Viswanathan's case illustrates the dangers of pushing writers to do too much, too soon.

``It takes a 40-year-old to write a novel for a 20-year -old,'' says Frankel, who wrote her first novel at 25. ``This is what happens when teenagers try to write books. They don't have the life experience to make it true or real or funny. She's a kid.''