America: Last week, Kaavya Viswanathan was on top of the world. The 19-year-old author of a best-selling novel had a six-figure contract to write a second book and a film deal with Dream Works.
Today, the Harvard student is in disgrace after her novel was withdrawn from shops following the revelation that parts of it were plagiarised from the work of another writer.
Viswanathan has apologised for copying from books by Megan McCafferty, which she admits to reading three or four times but claims that the plagiarism was unconscious.
"I must have just internalised her words. I never, ever intended to deliberately take any of her words," she said.
When Viswanathan internalises, she does it on an impressive scale and at least 40 passages of her How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life will be familiar to thousands of teenage girls who have read McCafferty's Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings.
On page six of Sloppy Firsts, McCafferty writes: "Sabrina was the brainy Angel. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: Pretty or smart. Guess which one I got. You'll see where it's gotten me."
On page 39 of Viswanathan's novel, she writes: "Moneypenny was the brainy female character. Yet another example of how every girl had to be one or the other: smart or pretty. I had long resigned myself to category one, and as long as it got me to Harvard, I was happy. Except, it hadn't gotten me to Harvard. Clearly, it was time to switch to category two."
On page seven of Sloppy Firsts, McCafferty writes: "Bridget is my age and lives across the street. For the first 12 years of my life, these qualifications were all I needed in a best friend. But that was before Bridget's braces came off and her boyfriend Burke got on, before Hope and I met in our seventh-grade honours classes."
Page 14 of Viswanathan's novel reads: "Priscilla was my age and lived two blocks away. For the first 15 years of my life, those were the only qualifications I needed in a best friend. We had first bonded over our mutual fascination with the abacus in a playgroup for gifted kids. But that was before freshman year, when Priscilla's glasses came off, and the first in a long string of boyfriends got on." No phrase is too small to be "internalised", so both books feature a male love interest who smells "sweet and woodsy" and both protagonists joke about visiting "170 speciality shops" at a mall.
The plagiarism revelations follow two literary scandals in the US that saw James Frey admitting he had invented episodes in his autobiography A Million Little Pieces and edgy transgender author JT Leroy was exposed as a comfortable, middle-class housewife.
Viswanathan's story has cast light on a little-known corner of the publishing business: the world of "book packagers" who employ teams of anonymous writers to produce best-sellers.
Viswanathan was introduced to Alloy, a book packaging firm, through a consultant her family hired to help her apply to Harvard, and Alloy helped her shape the book's plot. Indeed, the publisher's contract was with Alloy and the company shared copyright with Viswanathan.
The writer insists that Alloy played no part in her plagiarism, although she acknowledges that the company replaced her original plot with a storyline that was similar to one of McCafferty's.
Alloy helped her to produce four sample chapters of her novel, but she says the company's role after that was limited to minor editing.
Publishers Little, Brown took the unusual step this week of withdrawing all copies of Viswanathan's book from shops, and Dream Works said it was considering the fate of the film deal.
Viswanathan could face legal action from her publishers and she is probably finished as a fiction writer, but she may still have a bright professional future ahead.
When she leaves university, the Harvard undergraduate hopes to become a Wall Street investment banker, a career in which the ethical standards that prevail in the publishing world may seem just a little quaint.
