Up in Ontario

Author's Forbidden Love

Authors have a fascination with creation. You might call it a love affair. This love enables them to doggedly carry on writing their books, with little financial reward, or with a speculative financial reward a far-off mirage, while no one cares and no one reads them. But it has recently come to light that Australian author Norma Khouri may have taken creativity too liberally, and created not just her text but herself as well, as alledged by the Sydney Morning Herald.

In case you have not been paying rapt attention to the publishing press, let me fill you in on the case. Ms. Khouri wrote a book entitled Forbidden Love, a memoir of her experiences as a Jordanian woman, in particular focused on the "honour" killing of her best friend. Large publishers bought up the rights to the book all over the English-speaking world and Ms. Khouri toured and presented herself to book clubs and audiences to tell her story. Unfortunately, it seems her personal story was an fabricated as her memoir. Now publishers are pulling the book off of shelves, led by the originating publisher, Random House Australia, and Ms. Khouri has gone into hiding, saying only, "I completely and utterly deny these allegations and can prove they are false beyond any doubt."

The Guardian newspaper has a good summary of the Khouri case.

What interests me about the incident though is not the circumstances or the details Ms. Khouri identity. I'm interested in the shrill pitch of the reaction of her publishers (Shock! Outrage!) and the implicit agreement that readers are buying an image of the author and not the book, its content and its story. If Forbidden Love had been published as a novel, and the same course of events had followed, what would have been the reaction?

Some outlets have even gone so far as to call the issue plagiarism. But last time I checked, plagiarism was copying someone else's work and calling it your own, not making up an alternate identity and calling it your own. If Ms. Khouri ends up being a student from Chicago, who has spent some time studying at an American school in Jordan, as the Sydney Morning Herald alledges, the book remains the exact same. If Ms. Khouri ends up being an extreme marathon runner with a penchant for limericks and woolly socks, the book remains the same. If Ms. Khouri doesn't even exist and an actor has been hired to play her role, the book remains the same.

Or does it? It seems to me that in our touchy feely world, books are marketed to exist as product spin offs from the celebrity of the author, a way for average Janes to get in touch with the person they see on the TV and hear on the radio, a way for any of us to read about and feel the pain and horror of what it must have been like to live in one of those shadowy parts of the world. Then we can go back to worrying about finding parking at CostCo.