Jennifer Weiner is jealous

“What’s a girl have to do to get plagiarized in this town?” asked chick-lit favorite author Jennifer Weiner via her Web site as she headed off on book tour for Goodnight Nobody.

The New York Times reported this week that Harvard student Kaavya Viswanathan had ripped passages from not just one but three authors as she filled the pages of her publisher-packaged teen novel How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life. (Note: Quite collectible copies are in slim-to-none supply on Alibris.)

Over at The Harvard Crimson, which originally reported the more-than-striking similarities between passages in Opal Mehta and Megan McCafferty’s young adult novels, staff writer Will Payne asked “so what?” Sampling happens all the time in the world of hip-hop, argued Payne—perhaps Viswanathan could just be considered a “master sampler.”

Weiner seems to agree. Viswanathan’s book may have been pulled from bookstore shelves, but as Weiner points out, plagiarism has probably been pretty good for the book sales of the three aggrieved authors: McCafferty, Sophie Kinsella, and Meg Cabot.