Epistolary Crime Spree

Every good writer needs a unique voice, and Lee Israel has one. But she's not above lifting someone else's. In her memoir, she writes about borrowing lines from Dorothy Parker, and even steals her title—"Can You Ever Forgive Me?"—from one of Parker's letters. The catch is, it wasn't a real letter; Israel wrote it. She was a serial letter forger, and her book is all about her white-collar crime. In the early '90s, as Israel's career as a "star" biographer dried up (her subjects included Tallulah Bankhead and Estee Lauder) and she ran out of money, she created about 400 letters from celebrated dead people—Lillian Hellman, Noel Coward and silent screen siren Louise Brooks—and sold them as authentic relics to reputable dealers. Eventually, the FBI tracked her down, after she started to swap real letters with her fake ones in library special collections.

At a breezy 127 pages, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" at times unravels like a good heist movie. Israel's methodology was meticulous. For vintage paper, she ripped out blank paper from an ancient journal in a New York library. She prowled secondhand stores for old typewriters on which she tapped out her creations, and she faked her subjects' signatures by careful tracing. Facsimiles of her letters illustrate her narrative, so you can so how brash and ridiculous they were. But because she never went after true literary lions (she was too scared to steal a Poe letter worth $14,000), the theatrics of her story feel a little overblown. Edna Ferber, one of her targets, may have fans but let's face it, she's no Hemingway. We live in a culture of imposters, from James Frey to MySpace loners with legions of faux friends. Since Israel's sins were not so great to land her in prison, you could argue she didn't need a whole book for absolution. A long letter would've sufficed.

© 2008