Kaavya Viswanathan: The Untold Story

Missing Pages S01E01 

Kaavya Viswanathan: The Untold Story

Bethanne Patrick: In the mid-aughties, college kids across the country were socializing in a whole new way.

Movie Clip - The Social Network: People want to go on the internet and check out their friends, so why not build a website that offers that. Friends, pictures, profiles…

Bethanne Patrick: As the legend goes, in 2004 a group of roommates at Harvard launched an exclusive campus social network and by 2006…everybody, everywhere was logging on.

Movie Clip - The Social Network: I'm not talking about a dating site. I'm talking about taking the entire social experience of college and putting it online.

Bethanne Patrick: Facebook changed the whole college experience. Rather than waiting for a call or to bump into your crush in a lecture hall, friend requests and the coveted poke – remember pokes – became the new social currency.

And it’s here, in this pivotal moment in history, where our social lives moved online, that our story begins. 

Enter Kaavya Viswanathan, the Harvard sophomore with something much cooler than a friend request. She was the girl with the book deal.

TV Clip - TODAY on NBC: Written by first time author, Kaavya Viswanathan, who was signed to a book deal as a Harvard freshman for a reported $500,000.

Bethanne Patrick: Her debut Young Adult novel, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life, was set to release from publisher Little Brown & Company, that spring of 2006 – remember, just as Facebook had cemented itself as a necessity for young Millennials? 

TV Clip - CBS reports on Facebook: On college campuses, it's called the Facebook trance. To everyone else, it's spending too much time in front of your computer, glued to a website called thefacebook.com.

Bethanne Patrick: But things didn’t go as planned…

Kaavya Viswanathan: And I got a call from, like, an unknown number on my cell phone, and it was a reporter from the Harvard Crimson. “Do you have any comment on these alleged similarities between your work and these other works?”

Radio Clip - NPR: It looks like many readers may never really find out how Opal Mehta got kissed, got wild and got a life after all. The highly publicized debut novel by Kaavya Viswanathan has been ordered off the market by its publisher after a week of intense scrutiny.

Bethanne Patrick: Weeks after the book’s release, it was plucked from shelves, and Kaavya became the cautionary tale of plagiarism in publishing. 

Then, like a bad dream you can’t quite shake, the story followed her everywhere. When she landed her first job as a lawyer, the snarky Gawker headlines read, “Harvard's Most Infamous Plagiarist Is More Successful Than You.”

When her parents died suddenly in an accident, another Gawker article read, “Parents of Harvard's Chick-Lit Plagiarist Die in Plane Crash.”

Now, sixteen years later, we’re here to investigate what really happened to this young woman. Was this a simple cut and dried case of plagiarism? Or did the adults in the room lead a teenager astray while collecting on a hefty book advance?

As in every episode of Missing Pages, nothing is what it seems. Stay with us. After the break, we’ll rewrite the narrative on one of the biggest modern plagiarism scandals. And we'll hear directly from Kaavya in her first interview about her experience as a YA writer in fifteen years.

Kaavya Viswanathan: You only have your one reputation. It means a lot what you attach your name to, and you have to think about that.

Bethanne Patrick: Ya know, just an average day.

Bethanne Patrick: Welcome to Missing Pages. I’m your host, Bethanne Patrick – literary critic, author, and publishing industry insider. On this podcast we revisit literary cold cases and explore what we missed about the story the first time around. Let’s dive into our first episode, “The Full Package: The Kaavya Viswanathan Story.”

In Season One of Missing Pages, I’ll be your guide, as we look back at some of the most iconic, jaw-dropping, and just truly bizarre book scandals to shape the publishing world. In every episode we re-examine the headlines and go behind the scenes to give  you the unabridged industry story we all missed the first time around. Because isn’t there always a page that gets cut from the final draft?

On that note, let's find the missing pages together on today’s episode -

Chapter I: Green Envy & Crimson Copy

Time to set the scene.

Abe Riesman: There was so much happening, and The Crimson, because it was right there, was able to report on a lot of it.

Bethanne Patrick: That’s journalist and author, Abe Riesman. Before her recent book, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee, was a best-seller, Abe was part of the Harvard class of 2008.

Abe Riesman: A lot of coverage is happening at The Crimson about the nascent business entity called thefacebook.com, about president Larry Summers and his resignation, about the failed, never actually materialized exactly, Harvard pornography magazine that, like, finally came out, but was mostly just a rumor for a while that seemed controversial. Like, because the art section had become this kind of – like [it] hadn't existed for a while, and then it came back, and it was gone, it came back, it was so inconsistent that there wasn't much institutional memory and institutional training.

Bethanne Patrick: Hierarchy aside, something was happening across all media in the mid-2000s. 

Video Clip - TedX Talk: We've gone from those three network news shows to content all day, every day. It makes it very, very difficult to determine what's news and what's simply theater.

Bethanne Patrick: The internet, social media sharing, and the culture’s embrace of the twenty-four hour news cycle – well, even school newspapers were feeling it.

Abe Riesman: There had been mainstream interest in some stories that Crimson writers had been able to get. There were indeed wonderful writers who have gone on to be actually good writers, but at the time, were just sort of writing juvenilia, myself very much included. And, you know, the Crimson had this long tradition as kind of a feeder for major media outlets.

Kaavya Viswanathan: While the Harvard Crimson was on a roll receiving national attention for its coverage, there was also the matter of what it means to be a college student at Harvard that we must contend with here.

Abe Riesman: I got into Yale, and that was huge because I was a neurotic, bipolar child with lots of emotional issues who thought that if I didn't get into the best college, it was just a judgment that my life had been worthless, you know?

Bethanne Patrick: Like Abe, Kaavya started working on a record that would appeal to the likes of Harvard early on.

Kaavya Viswanathan: It's a very immigrant mentality, I suppose, but I, you know, was raised as a result of this. Like always, like my family, like, always told me, you know, you have to be better,

you have to be smarter, you have to work harder.

Bethanne Patrick: So, who is Kaavya Viswanathan and how did she arrive at Harvard at this particular intersection in history, when Facebook, fast news cycles, and really all manner of online shenanigans were affecting each other?

Born in Chennai, India in the late 80s, Kaavya Viswanathan was the only daughter of two doctors. The family moved around the world, living in Scotland before her parents eventually settled in Franklin Hills, NJ in the 90s. 

For high school, Kaavya attended an application-only, public magnet school – The Bergen County Academies. There, she was a star student and a recognizable name on campus. As the editor of the school newspaper and the recipient of numerous writing awards, Kaavya pursued her passion for writing and words from an early age. A goal-oriented teen, it was no secret that Kaavya dreamed of Harvard. 

The first doors opened for Kaavya in the publishing world when her well-connected college applications coach, Katherine Cohen, founder of a private counseling service and author of Rock Hard Apps: How to Write the Killer College Application, was hired to work with the high school junior.

Video Clip - IvyWise: At the end of the day, we're helping students not only become better college applicants, but we're imparting the life skills that they're gonna be using in college and beyond in their careers.

Bethanne Patrick: If you’re unfamiliar with the practice of hiring a college counselor, for families who can afford it, this is definitely a common practice.

There also was that little, itty bitty, star-studded scandal a few years back…

TV Clip - ABC News: This is ABC's Aaron Katersky. 50 people have been charged in what federal prosecutors in Boston have called the largest college admissions cheating scandal ever prosecuted in the United States.

Bethanne Patrick: Now, to be very clear: IvyWise and Katherine Cohen were in no way involved in this larger federal admissions case. But, the high profile court case shows just how widespread the pay-to-play college counselor space is for affluent families.

Our highly paid college counselor was working with Kaavya when the teen shared a several-hundred page novel of Irish historical fiction. You know, a totally normal side project for every millennial teenager? 

Cohen, impressed with the writing, passed Kaavya’s work along to her own talent rep at the William Morris agency, now known as WME, who sent it over to super agent Jennifer Walsh, who headed up fiction talent at the time. And that’s when things started to take off for Kaavya.

While Jennifer Walsh at William Morris did not move forward with the teen’s historical fiction, this introduction did lead somewhere. Through WME, Kaavya was introduced to someone at Alloy – which is a book marketing and packaging company. 

We’ll talk more about book packaging in a minute but for your reference, Alloy’s business model is that they basically identify marketable authors and then pair them with sellable book proposals, which they’ve come up with in-house. From there, Alloy profits when the book is sold to a publisher and optioned into even more lucrative extensions. Think movies, TV shows, action figures… the whole nine yards.

You may have seen The Clique, Work It, or Everything, Everything. All three are movies adapted from books packaged by Alloy.

Movie Trailer Clip - The Clique: From the New York Times Bestselling Book Series by Lisi Harrison, meet The Clique.

Movie Trailer Clip - Work It: The more extra-curricular activities you do, the higher chances are of getting into a top tier college

Movie Trailer Clip - Everything Everything: I’m willing to sacrifice everything just to live one perfect day. 

Bethanne Patrick: Alloy liked Kaavya’s story and background, and when the press materials for her book came out, it was clear why. In a piece for Lit Hub, journalist Kevin Young examines why Kaavya was the perfect marketing vehicle for Alloy’s book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life.

Here’s our producer reading an excerpt from Kevin’s 2018 piece, “Getting Inside The Mind of a Plagiarist”: 

Voiceover: The author photo and front cover are tough to identify, treating Viswanathan essentially as a stand-in for the book’s protagonist. And they supplied the statement: “One is a sophomore at Harvard, and one will do just about anything to get in. Meet Kaavya Viswanathan, and Opal Mehta.”

And all this press worked. After being sold to Little, Brown, with movie rights secured at Dreamworks, it was a hit. There was just one problem: it was allegedly plagiarized.

And how did the plagiarism accusations arise? Abe reflects on those Harvard Crimson meetings, which broke the plagiarism scandal to the world. 

Abe Riesman: It was a pretty big deal when one of the arts section’s writers was able to get this scoop. It happened, the initial story about how there were these strike –

I think that the term we kept using was strikingly similarities, if I recall correctly –

Bethanne Patrick: And from what Abe describes, the scandal seemed to get bigger and bigger, taking on a life of its own.

Abe Riesman: You know, this isn't my story, but I feel like there's more to this than just Kaavya somehow, subconsciously or consciously, plagiarized in like – because the point was the story kept going. Like every week, every day, there was another passage that was lifted from somewhere. And it happened so often that I was like, “Why on earth would any person writing this book think they could get away with that?

Bethanne Patrick: Something’s off here. Why would this young, talented person throw everything away? 

TV Clip - Today on NBC: The similarities are striking. Viswanathan issued an apology statement, raising even more questions saying she had read both McCafferty books, loved them, and must have unintentionally internalized them.

Abe Riesman: We all watched the Katie Couric interview. Like, yeah, I mean my memory, and I'm sure this is disproportionate because I hung out with fellow aspiring journalists, but my memory was like everyone at Harvard watched it. You know, like we all were, even if we didn't watch it, we all were aware of what happened on the interview.

TV Clip - Today on NBC: Clearly, it seems as they were almost directly lifted from her books. So, it's almost difficult to understand how they could be so similar if it was just a case of you internalizing her words and somehow they were in your unconscious and then spelled out as you were writing this novel.

Bethanne Patrick: Taking a step back for a moment, remember how Kaavya was whip smart, winning writing awards in high school and writing hundred page manuscripts as a teenager? Remember how Harvard only accepts the best of the best? With the Crimson and other outlets alleging over forty counts of plagiarism in Kaavya’s book, Abe brings up another good point:

Abe Riesman: This was not high quality. This was not being done by somebody who was putting a ton of effort into it.

Bethanne Patrick: That is a good point. If someone this smart is going to cheat, wouldn’t they be a lot better at hiding it?  What did the Harvard student body get out of dragging one of their own through the mud? 

Abe Riesman: Everybody likes to watch stories about spoiled elites getting mad at each other and having slap fights. I mean, why do you think people watch Succession? Why do you think people watch Dune? You know, I mean, it's this real sort of neo-futile celebrity mentality where you want to see the members of that upper echelon brought low. And oftentimes, the way to bring them low is to make them look silly by watching them fight among themselves.

Bethanne Patrick: After the break, we’ll unpack just how book packaging creates scenarios ripe for million dollar TV franchises and abuse. Stay with us as the plot thickens.

Chapter II : The Two Ps: Packaging & Plagiarism

You probably know about book packaging without knowing you know about it.

TV Clip - Gossip Girl: You know you love me. XOXO Gossip Girl.

Bethanne Patrick: Remember Gossip Girl? That’s from big time book packager, Alloy.

Movie CLIP - Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants: …all three of you is going to fit all of this

Bethanne Patrick: Those sisters and their magic pants? Also, Alloy.

TV CLIP: The Vampire Diaries: Dear Diary. 

Bethanne Patrick: Those vampires and their diaries? Guess who? X-O-X-O, Alloy.

TV CLIP: The Vampire Diaries: It’s the world we live in. 

Bethanne Patrick: Here’s a friend of the pod, Tara Sonin. 

Tara Sonin: Packaging, I was somewhat familiar [of] as a consumer.

Bethanne Patrick: Today, Tara is the Director of Audience Development at New York Public Radio, but earlier in her career she was a veteran book marketer for houses like Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and even book packager Glasstown Entertainment. 

Now, having never worked with Alloy or on Kaavya’s YA novel specifically, a lot of what Tara is saying is hypothetical from her personal experience in book packaging.

Tara Sonin: But basically, if you don't know what it is, it's that an idea for a story generates in house with the creative teams. So, a bunch of, you know, cool girls in the nineties are sitting around the offices at Alloy trying to figure out, “What's something that other cool girls like us are going to want to read?”

And they come up with this idea, and then they own that idea at the company. They find a writer to write it. Now, back in the early days of packaging, this was more known as ghost writing. They find this writer to write it, the writer writes the story, they have very little to do after that. They've been paid. And then they sell that property as written to a publisher, and the publisher, you know, does what they do.

Bethanne Patrick: Tara helped us understand why someone like Kaavya was particularly attractive to marketers:

Tara Sonin: Teens and YA readers are way more susceptible to a package than an adult reader. They care more about the aesthetics and the title and the vibe, asthe youths would say, I think. Vibes.

So, YA, I would say, really matters more with, like, organic word of mouth, because, like, there's nothing that a teen hates more than a phony, you know? Whereas grownups, for better or worse, we kind of like to be handed our entertainment on a silver platter. Like, we don't mind being told what the next big book is. Whereas teens, I feel like are a little bit more independent and they wanna kind of pick for themselves

Bethanne Patrick: So, for sixteen or seventeen year-old Kaavya, who was a newbie to writing books and probably unfamiliar with this kind of “let’s determine the most marketable book and then find someone to write it” conveyor-belt-style approach, she might not have understood the machine she was entering into.

Tara Sonin: And I don't know if, you know, if they gave her Megan McCafferty's book as a reference, I could totally see, you know, her not really – she's an inexperienced college student. I could see her being confused by what to make of that.

Bethanne Patrick: This is all a hypothetical scenario that Tara is painting, but here’s where it’s worth exploring the cultural impact of packaged books. We don’t know that Kaavya got Megan McCafferty’s book as a reference from Alloy, but we do know that she has read it, which is not surprising since it was a NYT Bestseller.

Notice that all of those Alloy YA books I referenced evolved into massive successes beyond the books. 

TV CLIP - ELLEN: Our next guest is one of the very popular stars on the hit show Gossip Girl, take a look.

TV CLIP: Good Morning America: They are back, the fearless Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. All four are here.

Bethanne Patrick: It’s almost like the books weren’t even the point.

As a quick aside, our fact checker did reach out to Alloy for comment. While we didn’t hear back, it’s worth mentioning that the company has gone through multiple acquisitions and looks a lot different today than it did back in 2006 when Kaavya’s book came out. 

And for the record: packaged books do not equal bad books. I’ve worked on a few for National Geographic, all of which were highly fact-checked and included rich designs. 

Packaging companies are particularly good at churning out books more rapidly when there’s a lot of visuals or text design. And it’s nothing new. 

Movie Trailer - Nancy Drew: In the town of River Heights, there's no mystery that Nancy Drew can't solve.

Bethanne Patrick: Publishers have been churning out packaged book series, especially to Young Adult readers, for generations. Since 1927, The Hardy Boys books have sold more than 70-million copies worldwide. And their girlie rival, the Nancy Drew series, has sold to roughly 80-million readers. 

TV Trailer: Sweet Valley High: We love it. Francine Pascal, Sweet Valley High, the complete second season.

Bethanne Patrick: The soapy teenage escapades of the Sweet Valley High books sold 150 million copies and were translated in 27 languages.

Movie Trailer - Goosebumps: Cool, huh? Collect the entire goosebump series on video.

Bethanne Patrick: And Goosebumps was the second best-selling series in history, only after Harry Potter, with 400-million copies fleeing shelves. Yes, clearly, there’s a cash cow theme going on here.

But, for the ten-year-olds who stayed up late with a flashlight, tearing through Carolyn Keene’s adventures of Nancy Drew like I did, these books were and have always been foundational entry points into reading. For me, Nancy Drew led me straight into tearing through Agatha Christie novels in junior high. I didn’t care what kind of marketing machine made the Nancy Drew books possible, I just wanted more of them.  

And it’s because these packaged series can be so influential to the youths, that packagers, in some ways, might have an even greater responsibility to do right by their readers and their authors.

With these book marketing practices in mind, Kaavya, a brilliant, beautiful, young, Indian woman on her way to Harvard, was the perfect front person for Alloy’s new YA book. 

Tara Sonin: The authors that are let into the space in the women's market definitely tend to be more affluent, more white, cisgender, heterosexual, at least in appearance.

Bethanne Patrick: Here’s Tara again, unpacking this a bit more – in terms of the industry’s notorious diversity problem.

Tara Sonin: There are quandaries and questions that come up about, you know, are these companies predatory when it comes to writers, you know? If a packager sells a project for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but they've only paid the writer, let's say $10,000 –

Bethanne Patrick: Again this is all a hypothetical example about the practice of book packaging that Tara is walking us through.

Tara Sonin: – you know, is that fair? The writer did the majority of the work in putting the words together. So, and, and these things have, you know, with the advent of social media, you know, marginalized writers having more of a voice, these issues have become way more prevalent. And so I do think that a lot of packagers are having to reassess and reevaluate how they do business with writers.

Bethanne Patrick: This led me to wonder: was Kaavya Viswanathan’s story a cautionary tale about plagiarism or about book packaging? Remember what Abe said about the alleged forty counts of plagiarism in Kaavya’s book?

Abe Riesman: This was not high quality. This was not being done by somebody who was putting a ton of effort into it.

Bethanne Patrick: Who at Alloy or at Little, Brown & Co. is typically on the hook for checking a manuscript for plagiarism? Surely, when a book has been in the works for months, if not years, there’s gotta be a process for checking it for suspiciously similar prose?

Missing Pages reached out to editors across publishing houses to learn more. Surprisingly, our search turned up no good answers. 

Big publishing houses, based on our research, do not appear to rely on a standard set of best practices or even user-friendly technology to check manuscripts for instances of plagiarism. We were not able to find any publicized standard set of best practices around use of technology to check manuscripts for instances of plagiarism.

In fact, the party line was more or less a scoff. A trained editor could certainly spot writing similarities with their own two eyes.

Annie Chechitelli: Annie Chechitelli - I’m the Chief Product Officer at Turnitin. So, I am in charge of our products, how they serve customer needs, and understanding those evolving customer needs, and also building products for the future.

Bethanne Patrick: In an effort to demonstrate just how easy it could have been to check Kaavya’s manuscript for writing similarities, even back in 2005, we talked to one of the leading digital services…

Annie Chechitelli: So, Turnitin started in 1998. So, over, you know, 22 years.

Bethanne Patrick: Now, Turnitin’s target customer is not a book publisher.

Annie Chechitelli: So, our typical clients are educational institutions, higher ed, as well as I would say, secondary ed. Usually, just high school and not so much below high school. As well as researchers and journals and publications primarily dedicated towards academic research and academic publishing.

Bethanne Patrick: But, in speaking with Annie, it got me thinking: Why wouldn't a book publisher want to use a tool like Turnitin? The platform spot checks writing across 92 billion webpages. 

And for every document the platform ingests, like term papers or academic journal submissions, or in theory, a freaking book manuscript, the tool gets smarter and even more powerful, cross checking new writing against even more material. 

Annie Chechitelli: So what it does, at a high level, we look at it more so as similarity detection, right? Plagiarism is, more of an evaluation of that similarity report that we provide instructors, right? So, we're empowering them, the instructors, with all of the data that we have, right? And we match it against that database of information that we've collected, as well as that we work with academic publishers to continue to build.

Bethanne Patrick:  My first thought about Turnitin and tools like it is this technology gets those sneaky students in trouble for cheating on term papers. But the platform actually serves a much more constructive purpose. It helps students cultivate their own original voice as writers.

Annie Chechitelli: As turnin has developed, we've really taken this space of just similarity and expanded that over those 20 years to really impact, not just report. We have to also evolve the technology for other things. So, it's not just text matching anymore, or plagiarism, but we've started to think of it more as authorship, right? This is not, it's like, not just did I copy something, but was I the author of it?

Bethanne Patrick: Any writer will tell you they cringe reading their early stuff. I know I do. In the beginning, we’re all modeling our authorly voice after someone we’ve read and admired. It’s part of our growth. The hope is that someone will tap us on the shoulder and point out where our writing can grow beyond these early instances of emulation. 

For Kaavya, who was new to professional writing – she probably could have benefited from somebody at Alloy or Little Brown pointing out similarities. 

So, with what Annie shared, would it have been possible to detect writing similarities in a book using the TurnItin tool, given that the core technology was available well before Kaavya wrote her book?

Annie Chechitelli: We will call attention to those things and give basically kind of a score of say, based on those multiple different factors, and then we also show the instructor where that similarity is. 

Bethanne Patrick: What blew our minds even more was how smart this type of AI tool is at detecting authentic human writing. But not at creating authentic human writing.

Annie Chechitelli: Well, the interesting thing is that programs, AI, is getting good at that. But what makes it something that we can detect, which is even more fascinating, is that humans aren't that predictable, Right? Human writing isn't predictable. We're not gonna use the same word every time in the same phrase, right? Because that’s just not how humans think. 

Bethanne Patrick: This is refreshing to hear. I guess the robots aren’t going to put me out of business anytime soon.

Okay, so now we know it’s far from impossible to check digital manuscripts for plagiarism. In fact, there’s literally an “easy button” to push. 

I’ve got just one more piece of information, or missing page, if you will. In both Megan McCafferty’s and Kaavya Viswanathan’s acknowledgement sections – which are kind of like the “I’d like to thank the academy” awards speeches, usually at the beginning or end of a book – a name popped out. There is one editor’s name that does appear in both authors acknowledgement sections.

Looking to LinkedIn, this editor’s career arc took them from being an editorial assistant at Crown, where McCafferty’s books call home, to Alloy, where they helped develop “Opal Mehta.”

And though some sources have said that this particular editor left before editorial on “Opal Mehta” was complete, and that they did not help to write any of the book, this is the only name both books have in common.

This is not to say, “Aaha! A culprit.” Not at all. We’ve all worked somewhere and moved on, not knowing the life our projects take on after we’re gone.

After hearing this detail, I certainly thought about how this kind of thing could be linked to the confusing publishing industry as a whole.

Stay with us. After the break, we’re talking to Kaavya Viswanathan, in her first interview about the plagiarism scandal in fifteen years.

Chapter III: The Full Package

Bethanne Patrick: Thanks for being here Kaavya. 

Kaavya Viswanathan: Hi Bethanne. I'm so glad to be here. 

Bethanne Patrick: So, in this atmosphere, and as you know, any of us who have been the academic, literary high school students can say, it's a whirlwind, those past, last couple of years when you're applying to colleges, etc. In that whirlwind, what inspired Opal Mehta? 

Kaavya Viswanathan: Yeah. So, when I kind of told my college counselor that I'm interested in writing and told her about these books, so she had written a book on college admissions and so she had an agent and a connection to the publishing industry. And so, she spoke to her agent about me and kind of made the introduction and talked a little bit about my interests and my goals.

And her agent said, I'm not, it's a long time ago so I might not be getting all the details right, but her agent essentially said, you know, “We think you're great. Like, we think you're talented. We don't think either of these books, your projects are going to sell.” You know, very, very fair.

I 100% agree looking back on that. But you know, she said, “Let me see, I've got some ideas.” And so, then when they came back a few months later, it was to say, “Would you be interested in working with a book packaging company? We have found this company, or we've worked with this company, we found this company and they have an idea for a story that they think would work as the story for you to, you know, tell, and to be the face of,” and that was the story of Opal Mehta.

Bethanne Patrick: So, when the book was published, and it was well received, and I was working in publishing then, I remember it was very fun. I'm like, look at this book, this is something completely different. How did that feel? What did you hear people saying when the book came out? 

Kaavya Viswanathan: You know, it's funny. It felt great, obviously, like I was 18 or 19 when it came out, so I felt, it felt great. You know, I was in college. I was a sophomore at that point. Like, of course, it feels really good to see your book in the shelf at Barnes and Noble. Like, that's surreal and incredible, and like a dream.

It also felt – this part is a little funny, I guess – it felt a little like I had something to hide. This was something I'd been thinking about, so one of the things that was always very interesting with Opal Mehta is that I had been told, and I get why, like, I'd been told by my PR team and by everyone I was working with in the industry, like, to really never talk about the fact that a packaging company was involved. And like,you know, I was giving interviews and like doing press at the good parts at the beginning, and like, always that was kind of like the guiding factor, right? Like, you should never ever mention the packaging company. And if they ask questions about it, like here's how you answer. Like, here's sort of the angle to take. So, I always remember feeling like a little bit nervous that like, what if someone finds out that there was this packaging company and then like, everything will fall apart.

And of course things fell apart for different reasons, but it's just, I guess, funny looking back on that because, you know, like the packaging company had like 50% of the copyright and they were on like, the copyright page with me. And I remember my PR team, like before I did an interview saying like, “I really hope no one looks that closely at the, at that page, and here's how you should answer if you get asked any questions about it.”

BA:Now, when did you start hearing about these suspicions of plagiarism? How did, you know, how did it come to your ears? Was it something that came from your agent? Was it something you saw in the media? 

Kaavya Viswanathan: No, I remember it actually very well. It was, I think, a weekend night, so it must have been a Friday or a Saturday night, and I wasgoing to a party. I was in college, so it was late, it was late. I was going to a party, and I got a call from like, an unknown number on my cell phone, and I picked up just automatically, and it was a reporter from the Harvard Crimson.

And he was – he, I think it was a he – was asking, you know, can you, do you have any comment on these alleged similarities between your work and these other works. And I mean, I had no idea what he was talking about. I was like, stunned. It was, I remember it being dark, so it must have been, it was at night.

And yeah, I just had no idea what he was talking about. I was like, I said, I think I said something like that: “I don't know what you're talking about. I don't have anything to say,” and hung up. And then the next morning it was, yeah, in the edition of the Crimson. 

Bethanne Patrick: As we now know, the story got even bigger from there. 

Here’s where I had to ask Kaavya the question: what was it like going on the Today Show and being interviewed by Katie Couric about the alleged plagiarism.

Kaavya Viswanathan: I mean, I don't remember that much about it. Maybe [I] blocked some of it out, but I, you know, that was one of the examples, I think, of the whole situation sort of like, spiraling out of control and not really realizing the gravity of what was happening until the end.

So this was, I think, a time when everyone I'd been working with, like all the, I say adults, I guess they were the adults at the time, had, you know, thought this was going to go away. “It's going to go away. Here's what we're doing for damage control.” And then it kind of became clear this isn't going to go away.

So, they had me meet with,I believe a crisis consultant, like a crisis consultant or a PR specialist, someone in that line. I had one meeting with him, I don't remember his name or the firm, and he suggested that maybe I do an interview, that I proactively do an interview and that could be a good strategy.

I think it was probably like a matter of a couple of days between that meeting and going on the show, like actually going on the show. So, yeah, I don't remember preparing that much for it. I was, I think at that point, unfortunately in a little bit of shock, so just sort of doing what I was told.

I only remember silly details, like the outfit I wore, which I had really, really liked, but was never able to wear again.  So yeah, that was kind of what happened there. And I guess this is such a silly thing to say, I guess, infamous is the right word for the interview, you know? It honestly wasn't until I was kind of thinking, preparing for this podcast that, you know, my husband said, he's like, “You know, they're gonna ask you about the interview.”

And I was, in my, I guess, continuing naivete, I said, you know, “Everyone told me at the time, that was a really good interview.” And his face just changed and he said, “Kaavya, it's, no, I think the consensus is it was really not a good interview.” 

Bethanne Patrick: If you could go back and give that 19 year old Kaavya any advice, what would it be? 

Kaavya Viswanathan: Oh my gosh, so much.  I think the biggest lesson, well, two lessons, right? I think the biggest lesson that I learned, which is something that I definitely did not appreciate at 19, is just what it means to put your name on something.

And I think that, I just like, I didn't understand the weight of that or the import or the responsibility of that at 19, and I think that's kind of how I got myself into trouble in the first place. Like, I signed up to write a book that I hadn't even thought of the title of, or the character's names, or the plot or anything, which isn't something I would do now as an adult.

And then during the process, you know, I always took responsibility. After this came out, I took responsibility because regardless of how it happened, which is maybe something that we'll never actually know, it was my name, and it was my name on the book and that's the public face of it. And there's an ownership element of that. So, I've always, I took that responsibility. 

So, I would tell my 19 year old self, like you only have your one reputation. It means a lot what you attach your name to and you have to think about that. And yeah, accept that. Accept the gravity of it. I think that's, that's the big one.

Bethanne Patrick: That's a really interesting and excellent answer because I think it gets to the heart of so much of what we're trying to do on this podcast. And talking about identity and publishing and authors and, you know, the name that goes on the cover is truly, it is a responsibility. And there is responsibility on the publisher's part as well. But as you say, ultimately, you know, the buck stops, you know, with you in some way. 

And so, you have always maintained that you did not intentionally plagiarize. And I, you know, you can speak to that again if you want to, but my real question is less about that than it is about how do you think this built? Was it because plagiarism was sort of a trendy topic at the time? Is it because you are a young and beautiful person who the media could, you know, hang something on. And it almost feels like that. Like it was a convenient way to say, “Oh, look, here is someone really cute and lovely. And we can put this, you know, sign on her saying ‘plagiarist,’ whether it's true or not.

Kaavya Viswanathan: I guess. I think it's a few things. I mean, I think it was partly because there was so much media attention around the book at the beginning and a lot of attention about, like, the advance that I was paid. So, I think the amount of money involved definitely made it a much higher profile kind of story.

I think people are interested in like, you know, whatever dark doings of the Ivy league. A little, definitely like a little bit of that.And then I also, you know, when I was a freshman in college, I guess Facebook had just started, like the internet, that kind of culture of information, sharing through social media platforms and through internet platforms, was just starting to take off.

So, I think that also, I think everyone was surprised by how big this story became and how quickly, and I think part of was it, you know, kind of coincided with the internet as a forum for – gossip's not the right word – but for like a forum for like, cultural discussions, I think coincided with this event. So, I think all of those things maybe created a little bit of a perfect storm.

Bethanne Patrick: Yeah, that's a very interesting thing about the, sort of moving into web 2.0 and social media and people being able to say, “Did you hear, did you hear, did you hear,” and, and all of that sort of thing. Do you think the crime quote-unquote matched the punishment?

Kaavya Viswanathan: Well, I think that, you know, like I said, I took responsibility and at the end of the day, my name was on the book and the buck stopped there. I think that as a result of that, I've reflected on that, I'm a lot older now, I've grown, I've learned a lot as a person, but I think I paid a significant cost for what happened.

I think in many ways, I was the least, I guess like, I'm putting it in quotes, “the least powerful person in the room” through any of these conversations or anything that was happening around the book and the subsequent fallout. But I think I paid perhaps the most significant price for all of it. So, whatever the crime was like, yeah, I hope that I can move past it.

I will say that at least in my personal life, you know, my reaction to all of this, once it kind of happened, was to just put my head down and just try to just move on with my life and not – stay completely out of the public eye. Just try to put this behind me, keep my head down, and just work hard and do whatever I couldto move past it.

You know, it became very close to home because Harvard actually did a full investigation into whether I had plagiarized in the immediate aftermath of this. And they found that I had not, like their independent investigative committee found that I had not. And so, I was able to, you know, continue to graduate on time without any kind of penalty. So, that helped me personally, with being able to just like move forward on with my life.

Bethanne Patrick: They found you innocent of plagiarism. That's what you just said, correct?

Kaavya Viswanathan: Yeah. They did. Their independent – Yeah, I mean, it wasn't, it was never public of course, but yeah.

Bethanne Patrick: No, but  now it is. And, no, that's amazing. I think that's an amazing thing. Harvard branding is pretty much higher to me than Today Show branding. Let’s put it that way.  

Do you think that now – you have talked a lot about growing and moving on – have you healed from the trauma now of the media attention you got at that time? for, for better or 

Kaavya Viswanathan: Yes. I mean, for, for better or for worse, I have faced far worse challenges and harder challenges in my life than “Opal Mehta.” You know, both my parents passed away in an accident when I was 24.

Bethanne Patrick: Oh, I’m so sorry - 

Kaavya Viswanathan:  My husband and I have had various health concerns in more recent years. So, I would say that those are the kinds of things that I like, think about more every day rather than Opal Mehta.

And I've certainly learned and grown from the experience, but, I yeah, very much want to, you know, put it behind me and not let that continue these things. Not let it continue to define me. I know it's always gonna be part of my life. Partly because of the internet, it will always be there when someone does a Google search for Kaavya.

But yeah, [I’m] hoping to just be able to not let it dictate my choices or my decisions anymore. I really have no ill will towards anyone I worked with in publishing. They were all really good people. They were very kind, very nice to the teenage me. But you know, I think everyone is operating within a framework of incentives. It's not a bad thing. It's just how the world works and how a business and a system works. And I just wish that, you know, at 18, I had just known a little bit more about that.Because I think I would've just approached things very differently

Bethanne Patrick: Kaavya Viswanathan thank you so much for taking the time to be here with us today.

Kaavya Viswanathan: Thank you for giving me the opportunity.

Bethanne Patrick: Talking to Kaavya, I was reminded just how much it takes a village to make a book. From packagers, to writers, to editors, to book sellers, there are tons of hands in the process. And to have that many people involved requires a lot of trust. 

As far as where the guilt falls for the actual plagiarism allegations, it's hard to say. 

On one hand by Kaavya's own admission, her name is the one on the cover. But that doesn't absolve Alloy from their hand in developing the story. We may never know what Alloy, the book packager, did to help Kaavya or to ultimately hurt her chances of success. In any case, how many times in life do you get to rewrite the story?

We're so glad that Kaavya agreed to tell her side of the story, and we're happy to hear that she's currently working on her next book, which will be literary fiction, but this time for adult readers. 

That does it for this episode of Missing Pages, the podcast where we know there's more to every story.

Did our episode about Kaavya Viswanathan pique your interest in packaged books or YA reads in general? Well, have I got some titles for you?

Wondering how a packaged book series reads? Cozy up with Cecily Von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl. This iconic book series–turned–TV–show was a favorite of my daughters’ when they were growing up.

Do you want to see how the YA book genre has evolved since the primitive days of 2006? The Ninety-Nine Boyfriends of Micah Summers by Adam Sass is a queer teen rom-com fit for a generation ready for new stories and new voices.

Finally, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn is a must-read coming-of-age story in which a Black woman remembers her adolescence in 1970s New York City.

CREDITS

Missing Pages is a Podglomerate Original, and is written and produced by a small army. 

Showrunner: Caila Litman

Producer, Researcher, and Writer: Jordan Aaron

Producer: Matt Keeley

Production, Mixing and Mastering by Chris Boniello. 

Fact Checking by Douglass Weissman.

Legal Review by Alexia Bedat and Louise Carron at Klaris Law.

Marketing by Joni Deutsch, Morgan Swift, and Madison Richards. 

Social Media by Sylvia Bueltel. 

Art by Tom Grillo. 

Production and Hosting by me, Bethanne Patrick. 

Executive Produced by Jeff Umbro and the Podglomerate. 

Special thanks to Dan Christo, Kaavya Viswanathan, Emi Battaglia, Melissa Edwards, Tara Sonin, Abe Rieseman, Erin Somers, Annie Chechitelli, Emma Quong, and Jennifer Harrison.

You can learn more about Missing Pages at thepodglomerate dot com, on twitter @misspagespod and on Instagram @missingpagespod, or you can email us at missing pages at the podglomerate dot com. 

If you liked what you heard today, please let your friends and family know and suggest an episode for them to listen to. I’m Bethanne Patrick, and we’ll be back next week with another episode.