Kaavya's this girl with awesome grades and parents who were obsessed about her getting into Harvard. They even hired a college admissions consultant, which lots of parents do these days. This consultant reads some of Kaavya's writing, which happened to be about a girl whose parents want her to get into Harvard so badly that she never has any fun. The consultant sends it to a big agent, who sells it to a book packager, who makes a deal with a big publisher.

WHEN PEOPLE get accused of plagiarizing, they always have these really random explanations. Four years ago, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin published "The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys" and got busted for stealing stuff from Lynn McTaggart's book about Kathleen Kennedy. In Time in 2002, Kearns Goodwin explained that "though my footnotes repeatedly cited Ms. McTaggart's work, I failed to provide quotation marks for phrases that I had taken verbatim, having assumed that these phrases, drawn from my notes, were my words, not hers." This other historian dude, Stephen Ambrose, is a quotation mark spaz, too. Even other fiction writers, like Jay McInerney, Alex Haley, Jack London and Nella Larson, have been accused of unconsciously internalizing the words of other writers.