BUSTED! Plagiarists, Fakers & Literary Hoaxes

[crivens]

I can't believe she's pulling the race card. I hope Nora Roberts takes her down.

[intlschizo]

susyhomewrecker said:

I feel picked on now as our Native American Indians have always been picked on throughout history.

Riiiiiight, Cassie. Because genocide and denial of culture is totally like people calling you on your bullshit.

[BinkyBetsy]

barrett said:

With regards to Go Ask Alice, I first read that as an innocent 11 year old and was horrified. Then I read it again years later after I was no longer innocent shall we say and knew right away that the book was bs made up by someone who had no personal knowledge of what the hell they were righting about.

Right -- like when she smokes weed for the first time and it has a hallucinogenic effect. Same thing happened in Tuned Out. And I've never been quite sure if acid flashbacks are a UL, but the fact that "Alice" had one is pretty much proof against them!

[chiqui]

At the tender age of 11 or so I suspected GAA was a fake when Alice's later entries were described as being written on paper bags and the backs of grocery receipts. I mean what runaway teenager on the streets writes a diary on scraps of paper then somehow keeps them all together in order for later publication?

[Deleted]

I once read that there was some evidence that the "Jay" of Jay's Journal, the Beatrice Sparks book about satanism, really did exist. He was a teen suicide from Utah, I think. However, the story was very sensationalized in the book and probably "Jay" was making the whole thing up anyway.

The Hitler diaries were hilarious. They came out when I was a calligraphy-obsessed teenager and I was convinced immediately that they were fake -- because the initials on the front cover are "F.H.", not "A.H." I couldn't believe anyone was stupid enough to fall for them, especially after they published excerpts and they said things like "Invaded France today" and "That Himmler, always going on about the Jews." Of course it turned out the people behind the scandal were Holocaust revisionists trying to whitewash Hitler's reputation.

[augurey]

I know nothing about her, but this Cassie Edwards sounds just plain stupid. How does she get published? She claims she didn't know that plagiarizing is illegal. Really?

On the bright side, the guy whose nature documentary she plagiarized responded with the best snarky article I've read in awhile. And trying to claim she's a minority when she's 1/8 NA? I've seen her picture. Bitch, please. You can't say anything. Especially when she names her NA novel Savage Love.

[BinkyBetsy]

chiqui said:

At the tender age of 11 or so I suspected GAA was a fake when Alice's later entries were described as being written on paper bags and the backs of grocery receipts. I mean what runaway teenager on the streets writes a diary on scraps of paper then somehow keeps them all together in order for later publication?

Yeah, that's another thing I didn't question when I thought it was fiction. Now, I don't think it's implausible that someone in her condition would still keep a diary. It might be her only means of keeping herself together, and IIRC, the entries from that period do come off as distraught and incoherent (though not quite enough for authenticity). But scraps of paper? Steal a notebook, for god's sake! In fact, it's silly to think that she wouldn't steal, in that situation. Sparks or whoever did seem to go to a lot of trouble to make her a super-moral person except for sex and drugs. I guess so she would come off as someone who otherwise would have been Miss Teen Christian USA if Evil Drugs had not entered her life.

[ivy]

Beatrice Sparks must have had a thing for writing on paper bags because the lead character in It Happened to Nancy did the same thing. I always thought that was stupid. I was like, "Can't you find a piece of paper somewhere? Is it really that difficult?"

[indybear]

tabby said:

That plagerized ferret research is hilarious! I mean, totally morally wrong and all, and I'm glad the author got caught, but the juxtoposition of the research paper and the bad Native American romance has had me giggling all day.

Oh, me, too! It's such a break from the Britney and Tom Cruise batshit-craziness.

Also, there's a kind of happy ending - people (romance-novel readers, specifically) are donating money to prairie-conservation and black-footed-ferret conservation organizations. There's also a nice letter from the Newsweek-article author to SmartBitchesTrashyBooks.com apologizing for being dismissive of the romance genre. He sounds like a funny guy.

It's better than that - Nora Roberts pledged that she would match donations to Defenders of Wildlife up to a total of $5000. You just needed to email SmartBitches with a screencap or PDF of your receipt. In less than two days, SBTB readers met and went over the $5000.

A pretty great way to help some animals (and show you have a sense of humor)!

[chonies]

lolad said:

I'm a librarian in a public library and one thing they always emphasize is no judgement-no matter what title the patron is asking for. Sometimes that's hard. I'm not a lit snob, I could care less if people want to read Nora Roberts or John Grisham or what have you. But it's the type of stuff that's mentioned in this thread that's hard for me. I want to say, "You know that's fake-right?" But I don't.

Not to get too far off topic, but I find this really interesting, ethics-wise. I am in library school, and I teach an information literacy course, which is bibliographic instruction mixed with some other mayhem. Since it's a college course, there's a lot of emphasis on evaluating resources, appropriateness for research, etc. I am interested in the reasoning behind the policy of not informing people that the book they are about to read is fake, plagiarized, etc. I can understand the customer-service aspect of not wanting to be antagonistic and snobby, but from a content p.o.v. I'm kind of intrigued.

Please don't think I'm sassing you, lolad. I love philosophical chats on biblio matters.