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  • Can You Ever Forgive Me?

  • Memoirs of a Literary Forger
  • Written by: Lee Israel
  • Narrated by: Jane Curtin
  • Length: 2 hrs and 40 mins
  • 4.3 out of 5 stars (12 ratings)

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Can You Ever Forgive Me? cover art

Can You Ever Forgive Me?

Written by: Lee Israel
Narrated by: Jane Curtin
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Publisher's Summary

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 300 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 best seller, 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 300 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.

Exquisitely written, Can You Ever Forgive Me? is “a slender, sordid, and pretty damned fabulous book about her misadventures” (The New York Times Book Review).

©2008 Lee Israel (P)2018 Simon & Schuster

What the critics say

“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) 

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Clever

Loved this book, and the narration. My only disappointment was that it was not longer. I am grateful that Lee told her story, as no one researching it could have come close to how it unfolded. I am, of course, horrified by her forgeries... yet fascinated how she pulled them off. I liked how the book took me to New York City, and I felt the grittiness of life there. Adored the visual of the typewriter collection.

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