How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life is a young adult novel by Kaavya Viswanathan, an Indian-American woman who wrote it just after she graduated from high school. Its 2006 debut was highly publicized, but the book was withdrawn after allegations that portions had been plagiarized from several sources. Viswanathan apologized and said any similarities were "completely unintentional and unconscious." All shelf copies of Opal Mehta were ultimately recalled and destroyed by the publisher, and Viswanathan's contract for a second book was canceled.
Author
Kaavya Viswanathan was born in Chennai (formerly Madras) in India and spent her early childhood in the United Kingdom, moving with her parents to the United States when she was in middle school. Her father Viswanathan Rajaraman is a brain surgeon, and her mother Mary Sundaram is a physician who gave up practicing to raise their daughter. As is sometimes customary among South Indians, Viswanathan took her father's first name as her last name. Intending ultimately to apply to Ivy League universities, Viswanathan participated in an assortment of enrichment programs and extracurricular activities, including summers at the Center for Talented Youth, a Johns Hopkins University program for gifted children, as well as serving as editor in chief of her school newspaper and taking advanced placement courses at her magnet high school, Bergen County Academies in Hackensack, New Jersey.
Book deal
While attending Bergen County Academies, Viswanathan showed her writing – including a several-hundred page novel on Irish history she had already completed – to Katherine Cohen of IvyWise, a private college admissions consultancy which Viswanathan's parents had hired to help with their daughter's application process. Through Cohen, Viswanathan was signed by the William Morris Agency under agent Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and referred to book packaging company 17th Street Productions (now called Alloy Entertainment), a media firm responsible for packaging the Gossip Girl and The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants book series, among others. On the basis of an outline and four chapters of the novel that would become Opal Mehta , Viswanathan eventually signed a two-book deal with Little, Brown and Company for an advance originally reported to be $500,000. She began writing the book the summer before college, and finished it during her freshman year at Harvard College, while taking a full course load. Opal Mehta was published on April 4, 2006, and Viswanathan was profiled by The New York Times on April 6, 2006.
Opal Mehta centers on an academically oriented Indian-American girl who, after being told by a Harvard College admissions officer that she is not well-rounded, doggedly works to become a typical American teen: ultrasocial, shopping- and boy-driven, and carelessly hip. With Publishers Weekly calling the book " Legally Blonde in reverse," Viswanathan stated that her own college prep experience had inspired the novel: "I was surrounded by the stereotype of high-pressure Asian and Indian families trying to get their children into Ivy League schools." When asked about her influences in an interview given to The Star-Ledger of Newark, New Jersey (before any allegations of plagiarism had surfaced), Viswanathan responded that "nothing I read gave me the inspiration" to write the novel.
Michael Pietsch later told The New York Times that Viswanathan’s advance for her two book deal was less than the previously publicized amount of $500,000, and that it was split between the author and Alloy Entertainment. Alloy President Leslie Morgenstein asserted that while the firm helped Viswanathan "conceptualize and plot the book," it did not help with the actual writing. Though Alloy was no longer involved once the book was sold to Little, Brown, the company shares the copyright with Viswanathan. Her agent Walsh told The New York Times that the plot and writing of Opal Mehta had been "1,000 percent" Viswanathan's. The novel was edited by Asya Muchnick at Little, Brown, and the movie rights to the book were sold to DreamWorks SKG in February 2006.
Opal Mehta garnered mixed reviews, many of which described Viswanathan as an author of "chick lit."
Alleged plagiarism
Megan McCafferty
On April 23, 2006, The Harvard Crimson reported that several portions of Opal Mehta appeared to have been plagiarized from Megan McCafferty's first two "Jessica Darling" novels Sloppy Firsts (2001) and Second Helpings (2003), noting over a dozen similar passages. At the time, Viswanathan's novel had reached 32nd on The New York Times ' s hardcover fiction bestseller list. McCaffrey's third Jessica Darling novel, Charmed Thirds , had just been released a week after Opal Mehta , and was No. 19 on the same list.
McCafferty stated that she had learned about Viswanathan's alleged plagiarism through a fan's e-mail on April 11, 2006, the same day Charmed Thirds was released and nearly two weeks before the story went public. According to McCafferty, the email's subject read: "'Flattery or a case for litigation.' I thought, oh my God, somebody's suing me." Prompted by the email's allegations, McCafferty looked at Opal Mehta and later said that reading Viswanathan's book was like "recognizing your own child's face. My own words were just leaping out at me page after page after page." Contacted by the Crimson the day before they broke the story, McCafferty responded via email, “I’m already aware of this situation, and so is my publisher ... After reading the book in question, and finding passages, characters, and plot points in common, I do hope this can be resolved in a manner that is fair to all of the parties involved.”
On April 24, 2006, Little, Brown issued a statement from Viswanathan:
"When I was in high school, I read and loved two wonderful novels by Megan McCafferty, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, which spoke to me in a way few other books did. Recently, I was very surprised and upset to learn that there are similarities between some passages in my novel ... and passages in these books ... While the central stories of my book and hers are completely different, I wasn't aware of how much I may have internalized Ms. McCafferty's words. I am a huge fan of her work and can honestly say that any phrasing similarities between her works and mine were completely unintentional and unconscious. My publisher and I plan to revise my novel for future printings to eliminate any inappropriate similarities ... I sincerely apologize to Megan McCafferty and to any who feel they have been misled by these unintentional errors on my part."
Viswanathan's agent Walsh stated, "Knowing what a fine person Kaavya is, I believe any similarities were unintentional. Teenagers tend to adopt each other's language." The day after Viswanathan 's admission, Steve Ross of Crown Publishing Group – a subsidiary of Random House and the publisher of Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings – issued a statement in response:
"We find both the responses of Little Brown and their author Kaavya Viswanathan deeply troubling and disingenuous. Ms. Viswanathan's claim that similarities in her phrasing were 'unconscious' or 'unintentional' is suspect. We have documented more than forty passages from Kaavya Viswanathan's recent publication How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life that contain identical language and/or common scene or dialogue structure from Megan McCafferty's first two books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings . This extensive taking from Ms. McCafferty's books is nothing less than an act of literary identity theft ... Based on the scope and character of the similarities, it is inconceivable that this was a display of youthful innocence or an unconscious or unintentional act."
Ross said later that "We all felt it was important that we come to defense and make clear that we support our author. The notion that this was accidental stretches credibility to the breaking point." McCafferty's agent Joanna Pulcini also identified 45 "strikingly similar" passages, stating via email that "Many include identical phrasing, establish primary characters, and contain shared plot developments ... It is understandably difficult for us to accept that Ms. Viswanathan’s plagiarism was ‘unintentional and unconscious,’ as she has claimed." Ross added that at that time, McCafferty was "devastated" by the plagiarism, feeling "like something fundamental was taken" and "not sleeping, not eating."
In an April 26, 2006 interview with The New York Times , Viswanathan suggested that some of the plagiarism may have happened because she read both of McCaffrey's books multiple times and has a photographic memory. "I remember by reading," she said. "I never take notes." She added "I've never read a novel with an Indian-American protagonist ... The plot points are reflections of my own experience. I'm an Indian-American."
Sample passages
TV interview
On April 26, 2006, Viswanathan appeared on NBC's The Today Show with Katie Couric. Viswanathan maintained her innocence, saying that any and all similarities were "completely unconscious and unintentional" and that she must have "internalized words," never deliberately meaning to "take any." She maintained, "as I was writing,
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