can you ever forgive me memoirs of a literary forger

If you want to follow along with us, but you aren't interested in reading the book, you can always watch the recently released movie adaptation starring Melissa McCarthy. The book is fascinating and includes many examples of Israel's forged letters. After her writing career declined, Israel turned to forging letters to make ends meet. Check back each week and see what new topics we're talking about.Ĭan You Ever Forgive Me? is a memoir by Lee Israel about literary forgeries she created and sold over two years. Each week, I write a new blog post that talks about different aspects of the book, and you can interact directly with me and other readers by leaving your comments. Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” ( The New York Times Book Review).The Online Book Club, if you've never joined us before, is a book discussion group that takes place entirely online.

“Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining… gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics” (The Associated Press). Between 19, she wrote more than three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward-and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines.īut by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy-Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others.īefore turning to her life of crime-running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI-Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies.

Can you ever forgive me memoirs of a literary forger