Can you ever forgive me? : memoirs of a literary forger

Lee Israel’s hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others. “Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining...[in her] gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics." - The Associated Press 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. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. 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. Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvellous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” (The New York Times Book Review). Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthyLee Israels hilarious and shocking memoir of the astonishing caper she carried on for almost two years when she forged and sold more than three hundred letters by such literary notables as Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Noel Coward, and many others. Before turning to her life of crimerunning a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBILee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. Her first book on Tallulah Bankhead was a New York Times bestseller, and her second, on the late journalist and reporter Dorothy Kilgallen, made a splash in the headlines. 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 shed 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 three hundred letters in the voices of, among others, Dorothy Parker, Louise Brooks, Edna Ferber, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Cowardand sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers. Lee Israel is deft, funny, and eminently entertaining[in her] gentle parable about the modern culture of fame, about those who worship it, those who strive for it, and those who trade in its relics (The Associated Press). Exquisitely written, with reproductions of her marvelous forgeries, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures ( The New York Times Book Review ). The author describes how, for nearly two years, she successfully executed a remarkable forgery caper in which she used her talent as a researcher and celebrity biographer to forge more than three hundred letters by literary notables From a New York Times Book Review synopsis A New York writer recalls how she created and sold hundreds of fake letters “by” celebrities such as Noël Coward and the silent-film star Louise Brooks. An audacious memoir by a down-on-her-luck writer, "Can You Ever Forgive Me?" is Israel's story of the astonishing literary forgeries she conceived and successfully executed for almost two years