How Kaavya Got Packaged And Got Into Trouble

Slate.com

Plagiarism and the teen-marketing culture.

By Ann Hulbert

Thursday, April 27, 2006

"Is it hard work being a poser?" One of the Haute Bitchez at Woodcliff High School puts that taunting question to Opal Mehta, the protagonist of the teen novel by Harvard sophomore Kaavya Viswanathan, whose confession this week that she unconsciously plagiarized the work of the best-selling young-adult author Megan McCafferty has stirred controversy. The dig comes near the end of How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life when Opal's parent-driven self-packaging mission has been revealed to the entire high school. As her peers now know (from a tell-all Treo that she dropped), the senior has been devoting her fall semester to a marketing plan that the Mehtas fondly refer to by the acronym HOWGAL, How Opal Will Get A Life—a plan geared toward turning a science grind into a glamour girl. Heretofore she had been doggedly pursuing a more conventional marketing plan, HOWGIH, How Opal Will Get Into Harvard. The inspiration for the strategic swerve is Harvard's dean of admissions himself, who, at Opal's August interview, suggests that a girl who has been engineered since birth to be a super high-achiever needs to "Have fun. … Find out what you're really passionate about." Harvard doesn't want "automatons." By the January application deadline, he says, come back and "show us what a well-rounded candidate you've become. Sound good?"

More:http://www.slate.com/id/2140683/?nav=tap3