Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger

Add to Cart Add to Cart. Brick and Pigeons I?? A room with a view not of Alpine splendor, but of brick and pigeons, a modest flat I took in the spring of with the seventy-five-hundred-dollar advance that G.

I sold those letters to various autograph dealers, first in New York City, and was soon branching out across the country and abroad—for seventy-five dollars a pop. For the nonce, I was content, researching my Tallulah bio—just me, my cat, and my contract, in my cozy, rent-controlled room-with-no-view. And I regarded with pity and disdain the short-sleeved wage slaves who worked in offices.

I had no reason to believe life would get anything but better. I had had no experience failing. The book had respectable sales and attracted many admirers, especially in the gay community.

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By which I mean men. I continued to be wined and wooed by publishers, in various venues of young veal and Beefeater gin.

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• Journal dune femme de chambre (Classiques t. 32241) (French Edition).

My second book, Kilgallen, was conceived at one of those chic, deductible lunches, over gorgeous gin martinis. My work on the book began in the mids and continued for about four years. I had even given the library a percentage of my take on Tallulah.

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• Luscious Mom at the Party;
• Kinderkrankheiten von A-Z: Wo Naturheilverfahren wirken - wann Schulmedizin nötig ist (German Edition).
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Crime hardly gets more small-time. The most famous literary forgers, like Clifford Irving, played for million-dollar stakes.

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Israel stuck to smaller game. She needed hardly any equipment beyond some vintage typewriters from a secondhand shop and a stack of biographies and collections of published letters. Then she plucked out the best lines, added a few innocuous sentences as padding and occasionally threw in one-liners of her own. So she tells us, at any rate, and probably it is true.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Israel reprints both letters; she might have copied them from the Coward volume, but that seems like a lot of trouble. But who can be sure? Later, she began stealing actual letters and autographed papers of famous persons from archives and libraries, replacing them with forged copies.

She sold both forged and stolen original works. This continued for over a year before two undercover FBI agents questioned Israel on a Manhattan sidewalk. According to her memoir, in which she cites FBI documents from her case file, the agents left without arresting her or telling her what was going to happen next.

In Israel's memoir, she also claims she was never arrested or handcuffed, instead receiving summonses for federal court dates.

Can You Ever Forgive Me?: Memoirs of a Literary Forger by Lee Israel

Israel later expressed pride in her criminal accomplishments, especially the forgeries. Ironically, in a joke the reader will share, by purchasing her book we all participate in buying her that meal. And she's really an excellent writer. She made the letters terrific. According to her New York Times obituary, she had lived alone and had no children. The film held its world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival on September 1, , [20] and was theatrically released in the United States on October 19, From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

New York City , U. Archived from the original on October 18, Retrieved October 18, Retrieved May 19, The New York Times.