Kate Losse, the author of last year’s Boy Kings, which outlined the early culture at Facebook from her experiences as employee #51, has accused Dave Eggers of stealing her book idea for his forthcoming novel The Circle. “Dave Eggers decided to rewrite my book as his own novel about a young woman working her way up through Facebook,” she writes on Medium today.
I find the suggestion that one can steal “the idea” behind a novel to be completely bizarre. It is even more ridiculous when the Big Idea in question is the hugely original “a person is excited to get a prestigious job at a huge company until she realizes that the way the company does business is suspect.” Wasn’t there a movie starring Tom Cruise based on the same Big Idea sometime back in the 80s?
The main philosophical issue both books claim to address is the eminently boring,
Would Facebook improve our social interactions?
I have almost died of boredom by the time I finished reading just this one sentence. The author of the earlier book seems convinced that she came up with something hugely original when she addressed this question in her writing but people have been bellyaching about the evils of Facebook for years.
Of course, the funniest part of the whole brouhaha is the following:
“From all appearances, it is the same book, and I wrote it first (and I imagine mine is more authentic and better written, because I actually lived in this world and am also a good writer),” she adds. Losse, in an email to The Atlantic Wire, admits she has not read his book.
Not reading a book is definitely an inventive way of engaging with its content. At least this Losse character is original in something.
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