I blogged about Emily Davies’ sale here and pointed out my confusion over the popularity of fashionista chick lit. Davies’ agent, Simon Trewin, was nice enough to stop in and talk about why he took on Davies as a client.

Now we have this from Women’s Wear Daily - yeah, not the usual place I find literary information, but this is worth noting:

Does the fashion industry have its very own James Frey in the making? Several New Yorkers quoted by name in the proposal for an upcoming memoir insist they’ve never met the author, Emily Davies, a former fashion writer for The Times of London. The book, “How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Front Line,” recently fetched a reported $900,000 bid at auction. Simon & Schuster’s Scribner division is set to publish the U.S. edition of the book, described as a cross between “The Devil Wears Prada” and “How to Lose Friends and Alienate People,” in 2007.

But while the 79-page proposal presents the book as an account of Davies’ own experiences, a closer look reveals material clearly drawn from the work of another writer. The precis of chapter 12, which describes Davies’ June 2002 trip to interview for a job at American Vogue, includes scenes of her meeting the magazine’s then-features associate Alexandra Kotur and publicists Paul Wilmot and Nadine Johnson, all three of whom advise her on how to attain a “glamour job.” “I have no idea what each day will bring,” Kotur told Davies of her own job, according to the proposal. “One day I could be in someone’s home on a photo shoot, the next night I’m talking to Minnie Driver and Sigourney Weaver.”

According to a Vogue spokesman, however, the conversation never took place. “Alexandra Kotur has never met this person,” he said Thursday. The quote appears to be taken from a 1998 article in The New York Times, “The Glamour Girl’s Guide to Life,” by Monique P. Yazigi. The encounters with Wilmot and Johnson, which Davies describes as having taken place at a party at Bungalow 8, also look to be fabricated, the quotes lifted from Yazigi’s piece.

Davies’ explanation goes like this - actually, it is this:

Davies, who reportedly departed The Times of London last year amid an inquiry into her expenses, responded to WWD’s questions with a statement defending her actions in the proposal. Saying it was “not intended for public consumption,” Davies claimed, in effect, that it was easier for her to give prospective publishers the flavor of her memoir by appropriating other writers’ words than by relying on her own memories. “The first thing I did when I began putting together my proposal…was to dig out a mass of notes, cuttings and stories I had assembled over the years.…Although I used these notes in the proposal, there would be no question of my using any unoriginal material in my finished book.”

Why, oh why…

Okay, let’s establish a new bright-line rule. It’s a simple one, really. Kind of figured it was one of those unspoken things, but I guess not. Here we go: I [insert name here] will not use other people’s words, experiences, plots and ideas and pretend those words, experiences, plots and ideas are my own. Ever.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 7:20 am and is filed under About Authors, About Books, About Publishing, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.