Courtesy of Gawker, that heartbreaking bitch. Well, what can you expect from a New Yorker, eh?
Brief recap of the Fake Writer Roundup.
Exhibit A:
JT LeRoy, the young, mixed-up transexual addict who used to be a lot lizard (truck stop child hooker).
Not so much, on all counts.
Middle-aged, crafty, straight, married mundane with a perfectly respectable past and a nice, clean apartment in a good part of town. Which was part of the problem. So, whachagonnado? Ya hire your sister-in-law for appearances, put her in a fright wig and CNIB shades, and have her sleep with Asia Argento: bingo, instant wunderkind.
Exhibit B:
James Frey, ex-con, hardened, hard-living addict who found salvation in a sometimes-brutal honesty and acceptance of personal responsibility.
Not. So. Much.
James Frey, coddled, middle-class boy who has been pulled over for drunk driving a coupla times and may once have prank called an ex-girlfriend.
So now we come to Exhibit C:
Kaavya Viswanathan, wholesome, overachieving valedictorian and current Ivy Leaguer and literary wunderkind, every Indian parents' dream daughter.
Not. So. Fast.
Kaavya Viswanathan, not the first young woman to be used by older, wiser publishers looking for a marketing hook. Now, she probably didn't write all of her new book; that much is clear. If she did, she stole, either deliberately or under the influence of the ghost of George Harrison, a dozen or so significant sections. And it's a given that big publishers sometimes pick, almost at random, somebody to give a huge career to simply because they need personalities to market, and if their outstanding characteristic is nothing more than their marketability, surely much the same can be said of half of Manhattan. But I encourage you to read the whole of this analysis by Gawker Intern Neel Shah, both because it's a thoughtful overview with particular reflection on the cultural pressures shared by both Shah and Viswanathan, and also because Shah is really, really hot.
And going to the transcripts:
Whatever dubious subcontinental wunderkind Kaavya Viswanathan did write, didn’t write, had ghost-written, cribbed, subconsciously borrowed, telepathically stole, or else was brainwashed into doing by a bunch of Pakistanis hell-bent on subverting India’s credibility in the burgeoning Southeast Asian chick-lit genre, at least one thing is clear: shit like this is the reason brown kids should stick to quantitative math and organic chemistry. Ms. Viswanathan, after all, had all the hallmarks of future i-banker or doctor.
etc, etc.
The raincoaster blog is quite proud and, in fact, almost insufferable about the fact that we have cracked the top 350,000 blogs in Technorati. If you've done better than that, we don't want to hear about it. No, really. We get all weepy and snappish when we hear about that sort of thing unless it's accompanied by a heartfelt "and let me teach you exactly how I did that" email.
A rather crushed (and 100% off-the-boat Chinese) friend of mine complains that the Vancouver Miss Chinatown competition has been won, the last ten consecutive years, by bananas who are half-Canuck, half-Chinese. She, an unsuccessful Miss Chinatown contestant herself, ascribes the blame to racist judges who prefer round-eyes.
A few of our longtime readers will recall the case of the New Zealand woman who impersonated Viggo Mortensen online for a couple of years. Actually, for all I know she's still doing it. But at the time I tried to make a few points about the illegality of posting information to the Internet which is designed to make people think you are someone else. Thanks to BoingBoing I've come across a nice article about all that and more 
raincoaster 