Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger

by: Lee Israel

Published by: Simon Schuster

Reviewed by Julie Failla Earhart

At first I didn’t get the blurbs on the back of Lee Israel’s Can You ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger. I thought the slim book might be a re-print, given the quotes were from Groucho Marz, George S. Kaufman, Katherine Hepburn, and Clara Blandick (Auntie Em of “The Wizard of Oz”). I had read the first chapter of this little gem when it hit me. The blurbs were forgeries! Quite clever even if it did make me feel stupid.

Biographer Lee Israel gives readers a small chapter of her life, a time when the royalties had dried up, and she had to resort to a life of crime to make ends meet. Oh, she could have probably gotten a job at some minimum wage job somewhere in Manhattan, but what was the fun in that. Israel had a lifestyle to uphold after all.

Can You Ever Forgive Me? Memoirs of a Literary Forger is a story of how one woman forged correspondence by Dorothy Parker, Edna Ferber, Louise Brooks, Lillian Hellman, and Noel Coward, to name a few, and sold them to various autograph and memorabilia dealers all over New York. The book comes complete with sample letters.

Israel makes no bones about what she did and doesn’t appear a tad bit sorry. She starts with some of her favorites–Parker, Coward, and Ferber–and tells how she practiced the signatures, how she made sure to use age-appropriate paper and typewriters, copied actual correspondence, and fooled some of the shrewdest dealers in New York. Israel even details how she got caught, her trial, and her sentencing–all in a scant 127 pages.

The book’s structure is unconventional in that Israel doesn’t follow the traditional arc, but there is an arc. There is no plot device to lure the reader in and no build-up of suspense. She lays it out…this is what I did, how I did it, how I got away with it for a time, and how I got caught. If I didn’t know this was true, (and I’m still not completely convinced), I would swear that an escapade like this would never work in the early 1990s. Goes to prove that New Yorkers may not be so jaded and skeptical after all.

Armchair Interviews says: A most interesting read.