14 - Whatever Happened to Kaavya Viswanathan?

Summary

The April 2006 article in the Harvard Crimson that alerted the public to accusations of plagiarism in Kaavya Viswanathan's debut novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life (2006), set off a media blitz of sorts, which catapulted the 19-year-old Harvard sophomore and author from fame and a $500,000 book contract to immediate infamy. On closer examination though, Viswanathan's mercuric rise and fall had all the symptoms that could contribute to such an anticlimax. Her life, from its involvement with IvyWise – a firm that coaches Ivy League aspirants in creating their applications – until the book deal, might have reaffirmed to the young writer that a novel can be coached and packaged, just as much as a college application. In fact, the book itself followed a path so scripted that its copyright was held by Viswanathan and the book packaging firm that worked with her. Firms such as these take targeted, even formulaic approaches toward creating media that will entertain, and Viswanathan's creative work was certainly subject to the dictates of what consumers want to read.

If originality, taken as a premise for all artistic work (especially fiction writing) can be micromanaged and ‘packaged’ the way Opal was, it might not have been unthinkable for the already overloaded Harvard sophomore to ‘repackage’ sections of existing novels. Add to this the hype: the writer of a novel categorized by most as ‘chick lit’ was awarded a $500,000 contract.