‘The Circle’ Author Dave Eggers Denies Reading Facebook Memoir That He’s Accused Of Plagiarizing

Comment

One of the weirder things to come out of all the discussion around Dave Eggers’ upcoming novel The Circle (which focuses on life at a fictional tech company) has been the accusation by Kate Losse that parts of Eggers’ book are lifted from The Boy Kings, her memoir of her experience as an early Facebook employee.

McSweeney’s, the San Francisco-based publishing company that Eggers founded, just sent me a statement from Eggers denying that he read Losse’s book at all. To be honest, I’ve found Losse’s claims to be pretty unpersuasive (more on that in a second), but the statement also includes some interesting commentary about the research that Eggers did (or didn’t) do for the novel, so I figured it was worth noting. Here it is:

I’ve just heard about the claims of Kate Losse that my novel, The Circle, was somehow based on a work of nonfiction she wrote. I want to make it clear that I have never read and have never heard of her book before today. I did not, in fact, read any books about any internet companies, or about the experiences of anyone working at any of these companies, either before or while writing The Circle. I avoided all such books, and did not even visit any tech campuses, expressly because I didn’t want The Circle to seem to be based on any extant companies or upon the experiences of any employees of any extant companies. Because The Circle has not been released, it’s my understanding that Kate Losse has not read my novel yet, so I trust that when she does read it she’ll understand that I have not read, and certainly never lifted anything from, her book.

This denial probably won’t persuade people who seem to agree that there are suspicious parallels between Losse’s book and Eggers’, so maybe we should take a closer look at the claim. As noted in the statement, Losse says she hasn’t read the book (the official publication date is Oct 8), so she’s basing her accusation on an excerpt published in The New York Times Magazine, and she posted quotes from The Boy Kings, with annotations highlighting similarities.

Losse first notes that like her, Eggers’ protagonist is hired to work in customer experience/support at a tech company, which isn’t exactly a telling or hugely specific detail — when I left Stanford in 2006, applying for those jobs was one of the default paths for liberal arts graduates who didn’t know what they were going to do with their lives. (True story: I applied for multiple customer support jobs at Google and was rejected for all them.)

That first note also says, “Her name eerily echoes mine in its phonetic structure: Katherine Penney Losse/Maebelline Renner Holland & in short form as well: ‘Kate Losse/Mae Holland.’” Hmmm.

Losse’s next annotation notes that both books include scenes where someone (Jake in Losse’s book, Jared in Eggers’) tells the new employee what their job will be like. The one after that points out that both books include discussions of company passwords. And so on.

It all seems to me, at least, to consist entirely of broad parallels covering experiences that will be familiar to many TechCrunch readers. I’m not trying to dismiss some of the bigger issues of cultural appropriation that Losse brings up, but I’m not sure an unconvincing claim that someone is “ripping off” your book is the best arena for that discussion.

The other interesting thing about Eggers’ statement is that he goes out of his way to deny doing any research related to specific tech companies, whether it’s reading books or visiting offices. That might dampen the enthusiasm of writers who see his portrayal of the book’s sinister tech company (also called The Circle) as a way to take “vengeance” on Google and Facebook. Eggers seems to be arguing that he isn’t attacking any particular company, and that the book is meant to be a broader critique of tech trends and culture.

Of course, if you wrote a novel implying that Facebook and Google are evil, it might just be easier to disavow any specific attack and let others make the comparisons.

[Photo: David Shankbone]

More TechCrunch

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

14 hours ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

15 hours ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking

You thought the hottest rap battle of the summer was between Kendrick Lamar and Drake. You were wrong. It’s between Canva and an enterprise CIO. At its Canva Create event…

Canva’s rap battle is part of a long legacy of Silicon Valley cringe

Voice cloning startup ElevenLabs introduced a new tool for users to generate sound effects through prompts today after announcing the project back in February.

ElevenLabs debuts AI-powered tool to generate sound effects

We caught up with Antler founder and CEO Magnus Grimeland about the startup scene in Asia, the current tech startup trends in the region and investment approaches during the rise…

VC firm Antler’s CEO says Asia presents ‘biggest opportunity’ in the world for growth

Temu is to face Europe’s strictest rules after being designated as a “very large online platform” under the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Chinese e-commerce marketplace Temu faces stricter EU rules as a ‘very large online platform’

Meta has been banned from launching features on Facebook and Instagram that would have collected data on voters in Spain using the social networks ahead of next month’s European Elections.…

Spain bans Meta from launching election features on Facebook, Instagram over privacy fears

Stripe, the world’s most valuable fintech startup, said on Friday that it will temporarily move to an invite-only model for new account sign-ups in India, calling the move “a tough…

Stripe curbs its India ambitions over regulatory situation

The 2024 election is likely to be the first in which faked audio and video of candidates is a serious factor. As campaigns warm up, voters should be aware: voice…

Voice cloning of political figures is still easy as pie

When Alex Ewing was a kid growing up in Purcell, Oklahoma, he knew how close he was to home based on which billboards he could see out the car window.…

OneScreen.ai brings startup ads to billboards and NYC’s subway

SpaceX’s massive Starship rocket could take to the skies for the fourth time on June 5, with the primary objective of evaluating the second stage’s reusable heat shield as the…

SpaceX sent Starship to orbit — the next launch will try to bring it back

Eric Lefkofsky knows the public listing rodeo well and is about to enter it for a fourth time. The serial entrepreneur, whose net worth is estimated at nearly $4 billion,…

Billionaire Groupon founder Eric Lefkofsky is back with another IPO: AI health tech Tempus

TechCrunch Disrupt showcases cutting-edge technology and innovation, and this year’s edition will not disappoint. Among thousands of insightful breakout session submissions for this year’s Audience Choice program, five breakout sessions…

You’ve spoken! Meet the Disrupt 2024 breakout session audience choice winners

Check Point is the latest security vendor to fix a vulnerability in its technology, which it sells to companies to protect their networks.

Zero-day flaw in Check Point VPNs is ‘extremely easy’ to exploit

Though Spotify never shared official numbers, it’s likely that Car Thing underperformed or was just not worth continued investment in today’s tighter economic market.

Spotify offers Car Thing refunds as it faces lawsuit over bricking the streaming device

The studies, by researchers at MIT, Ben-Gurion University, Cambridge and Northeastern, were independently conducted but complement each other well.

Misinformation works, and a handful of social ‘supersharers’ sent 80% of it in 2020

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Okay, okay…

Tesla shareholder sweepstakes and EV layoffs hit Lucid and Fisker