Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger

Description

Before 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. But 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. Between 1990 and 1991, she wrote more than 300 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. This is Lee’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper.