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Title details for Can You Ever Forgive Me? by Lee Israel - Available

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Memoirs of a Literary Forger

by Lee Israel
Jane Curtin
Audiobook
3 of 3 copies available
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3 of 3 copies available
Now a major motion picture starring Melissa McCarthy—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.
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.

"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).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 18, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781508266839
      • File size: 77203 KB
      • Duration: 02:40:50

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      To start, listeners will hear some of the most interesting letters ever signed by Louise Brooks and Noel Coward. Neither of them wrote those letters, though. Lee Israel did. Jane Curtin narrates the literary forger's memoirs in a defiant, often acerbic tone. Israel shares memories such as her delight in finding a $30 typewriter and her horror at having a nightmare in which Noel Coward chided her from beyond the grave with shameless humor. She also breaks down the steps of forgery, making listeners insiders in her criminal capers. Listeners will find themselves chuckling and smiling through Israel's career decline and rebirth as a forger and thief. Israel's memoir does have serious moments, though. Most notably, she remembers her partner in crime in his final years as he died from AIDS. J.A.S. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2019, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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