Can You Ever Forgive Me?

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Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy, this hilarious and shocking memoir recounts Lee Israel's astonishing two-year caper of forging and selling over three hundred letters from literary notables like Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, and Noel Coward. Before her life of crime, Israel was a legitimate author, with her biography of Tallulah Bankhead becoming a New York Times bestseller and her work on journalist Dorothy Kilgallen making headlines. However, by 1990, nearly broke and desperate to keep her Upper West Side studio, she made a bold career shift. Inspired by a letter from Katharine Hepburn and leveraging her skills as a researcher and biographer, she began forging letters in the voices of literary greats. Between 1990 and 1991, she crafted over three hundred forgeries, selling them to memorabilia dealers. Israel's writing is deft and entertaining, offering a gentle parable about modern fame and the culture surrounding it. With exquisite prose and reproductions of her forgeries, this memoir is described as a "slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous" account of her misadventures.