Where Could Kaavya Be?

When last month’s issue of Little India went to press, Kaavya Viswanathan was the $500,000 advance golden girl, feted and toasted for her first book How Opal Mehta got Kissed, Got wild and Got a Life.

Now she has become the poster child for plagiarism, after she was exposed for having copied materials from Megan McCafferty’s two popular chick lit books, Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings as well as from Sophie Kinsella’s Can You Keep a Secret, among others.

Viswanathan’s book has been withdrawn from shelves (scant available copies are now being sold online for $100 a pop!) and the publisher has cancelled her contract; no word on whether they plan to sue for the advance. The fantastic film deal is canceled. Viswanathan has gone into hiding since the scandal broke. She may not even be at Harvard or at home, which according to news reports wore a deserted air, with mail and packages accumulating outside. Could she be in India? Scotland, where she lived earlier?

In an earlier interview for Little India before the scandal broke, we had asked her if she had any moments of doubt or experienced writer’s block. She thought for a minute and replied, “Just the normal process of writing. I didn’t worry about whether I’d be able to write the book. I worried about whether it would be good, whether people would like it, what the reaction would be.”

Might that have made her take the drastic step of appropriating other people’s work? Or was she done in by the “write by numbers” demands of the chick lit world and her packaging company? We had asked her how she managed to write the book and study for her exams at Harvard simultaneously – both exceedingly demanding activities. She responded, “It was definitely a challenge. I wrote most of the book in my freshman year so I had to be real careful about budgeting my time. I wrote whenever I had a chance or a free moment. I wrote in the library on my laptop.”