Chick Lit Blogging

As Yglesias puts it: "Behind every random thing, there seems to be an interesting story." The random thing in this case is the inspiring story of the 18 year-old Indian-American Harvard freshman whose made-for-movie-adaptation debut novel about a high-achieving Indian-American high school girl who realizes she needs to get a social life to get into Harvard (and presumably, through the course of the novel, comes to learn that having a social life is a nice thing for its own sake too) has made every Indian-American person I know jealous. The interesting story is that it now appears she plagiarized parts of it, or else, even more interestingly, that parts were written/plagiarized by some kind of third party "book-developing" company which admits to having helped her not just conceptualize but also "plot" the book. This seems like a murky thing which, when you think about it, must obviously go on all the time, but no one knows or talks about it. Or maybe people in the teen-lit world talk about it all the time but no one pays attention.