Tina Fineberg
Former Facebook employee Kate Losse claims that her 2012 memoir, The Boy Kings, has been ripped off by novelist Dave Eggers. Losse notes that both her book and Eggers’s new novel, The Circle, are about a female customer-service employee at a major social network. Losse also points to Eggers’s conception of Silicon Valley companies, with their cavalier attitudes toward user privacy and their cultish corporate cultures, as being similar to her own description of Facebook. She annotated a section to show similarities between the two and wrote on her blog that The Circle, which has received rave advance reviews, “is the same book [as mine], 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),” though she has not read the novel in its entirety. For Losse, the perceived plagiarism is indicative of a publishing industry where “mainstream media outlets will take [Egger’s] writing more seriously than a woman's.”