While shopping for a book deal for her memoir, titled, “How to Wear Black: Adventures on Fashion’s Front Line,” former London Times of London fashion reporter, Emily Davies, bullshitted the whole thing. Okay, so I am being harsh, but people like her and others, who constantly plagiarize or are over indulgent with the ‘copy and paste’ function, mess it up for up-and-coming journalists, like myself. And like all great trends, I guess fashion had to be in the know. The story goes, according to WWD’s Memo Pad, titled Borrowed Memories:

Several New Yorkers quoted by name in the proposal for an upcoming memoir insist they’ve never met the author, Emily Davies, a former fashion writer for The Times of London. The book…recently fetched a reported $900,000 bid at auction… But while the 79-page proposal presents the book as an account of Davies’ own experiences, a closer look reveals material clearly drawn from the work of another writer.

The writer she took material from was actually looking for a book deal based on her own experiences, like Davies, but I guess was not as successful as Davies without the juicy made-up bits. What puzzles me is that Davies could have been quite successful with getting the book deal without the fabrications, if in fact she was actually an industry insider. Many of the people she claimed to be close to and the parties she claimed to attend were fabricated, according to WWD:

In the proposal, Davies offers specific examples of that status, including "dining with Donna Karan on sea cucumber in Tokyo" and attending "Jennifer Lopez's engagement party at Donatella Versace's Lake Como villa." Both of those claims seem now to be false, or at least inaccurate.

On another note, it seems that the category that is being killed is that of the memoir a la James Frey. Good ole, Jossip explores/targets Davies’ memories in Memories, light the corners of someone else's mind:

Oh, the trials and tribulations of the "memoir" category. It does get oh so tricky. So tricky, in fact that instead of writing her proposal on her own experiences as a fashion reporter for the London Times, journalist turned James Frey wannabe thought that lifting the experiences of Monique P. Yazigi, who penned the 1998 New York Times piece, “The Glamour Girl’s Guide to Life," was no big deal.

Whether or not the deal will be pulled is not of importance, it is the fact that people like Davies continue to thrive in the publishing/media industry. If one believes that they have a great book proposal, but don’t have the experience to actually flesh it out in the non-fiction, factual category that is what the fiction category is for. Take Jossip’s advice: “Granted, the sign of a great writer may very well be his or her ability to take on and explore lives that are far removed from their own. This is what we call "fiction." Example: Memoirs of Geisha. Written by a white guy. Fiction.”