CHATGPT – IT’S NOT JUST FOR COLLEGE TERM PAPERS ANYMORE! Mark Oppenheimer: Kitty Kelley was assigned a review of my Judy Blume biography, but did she read it?
Kelley writes:
Judy Blume began life in 1938 as Judith Marcia Sussman, an Orthodox Jew born “scrawny and underweight” in Elizabeth, New Jersey.
I write the opposite: the Sussmans, far from being Orthodox, were secular and non-observant, and they seldom went to synagogue. (Also, I did not write that she was born scrawny, but rather that “Judy was the smallest child in the house—brother David was four years older—and she was scrawny, chronically underweight.” So the quotation is wrong, and the meaning is wrong—she was an underweight child, not an underweight newborn.)
Her father was a dentist; her mother kept house for Judy and her older brother. After Hebrew school and a bat mitzvah, Blume graduated from New York University with a B.A. in education.
In the book, I explain why Judy did not have a bat mitzvah.
“I married at twenty-one…everyone did,” she recalled.
This quotation is not in my book. The first part—“married at twenty-one”—exists, in a different context, but the stuff after the ellipsis is an invention.
Feeling “suffocated” in her first marriage, Blume divorced after several years and immediately rebounded to a second husband. She left him two years later and “cried every day,” she said. “Anyone who thinks my life is cupcakes is all wrong.” She married George Cooper in 1987, and they remain together to this day.
This is all fiction. “Several” years? She and John Blume were married over 15 years. There is no usage of “suffocated” to refer to her first marriage. Blume did not leave her second husband after just two years. She never said she “cried every day.” I don’t know where Kelley got all this, but not from my book.
And that line about cupcakes? It is not in my book either. So far as I know, Judy Blume has never used a baking-related metaphor, or any dessert-related metaphor, to describe her life. She has not compared her life to cupcakes, éclairs, gateaux basque, or Cinnabons. If she has, it’s news to me, and it’s not in my book.
(Update: on further Googling, I do find that cupcake quotation attributed to Blume on several websites, including a British astrology site that has Blume filed under “Capricorn research.” But the quotation is not in my book. So did Kelley decide to chuck my book aside and do her own Blume-related research, turning, as one does in such situations, to internet astrologers? And then attribute her research into my book?)
Well, she wouldn’t be the first woman writing for a high-profile Washington publication to break out the Ouija board, but as Oppenheimer rhetorically asks near the beginning of his Substack:
The month before your book is published is, for any writer, a stressful time. We ask ourselves many questions: Will it be reviewed? If so, will it be reviewed favorably? And, “Will legendary celebrity biographer Kitty Kelley kick back in her Jacuzzi, tell Alexa to ‘play smooth jazz,’ sip some bubbly, fire up ChatGPT, and insert its madcap hallucinations into a review of my book?”
It certainly sounds like the latter is exactly what happened.