Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel
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, and many others.
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. 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 Coward—and sold the forgeries to memorabilia and autograph dealers.
Format: Paperback | 144 pages
Dimensions (cm): 21.4 x 14.2 x 1 | 236g -
Publication Date: 01 Sep 2018
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Publication City/Country: New York, United States
Language: English
Edition Statement: reprint ed.
ISBN10: 141658868X
ISBN13: 9781416588689
Condition: Good
A book that has been read but is in good condition. Very minimal damage to the cover including very minor scuff marks along the edges, and minor creasing, but no holes or tears. The majority of pages are undamaged with very minimal (barely visible) creasing, but no tearing. No pencil underlining of text, no highlighting of text and no writing in margins. No missing pages.