Debra Pickett

So, did Kaavya Viswanathan actually write any part of her novel?

Today's news offers up details of another accusation of plagiarism, this time from chick lit doyenne Sophie Kinsella.

To me, one of the most interesting questions in this whole scandal is when Viswanathan started cheating. Was she, at some point, just a standard issue high school writer chick who penned her own angst-filled short stories in the privacy of her big, suburban bedroom? Did the borrowed passages start finding their way in only after a college admissions consultant suggested that literary talent might get her into Harvard? Or was it the pressure of meeting a book-packager-imposed deadline that made her do it?

Or, did she always do it? Was she copying from the encyclopedia and the Internet on her 4th grade book reports?

Was she ever a writer, really?