In a 65-page book proposal obtained by The New York Times, Mr. Lehrer described the day last summer — a “muggy Sunday morning in St. Louis” — when his journalistic fraud was discovered.
“I feel the shiver of a voice mail message,” he wrote in the proposal, “A Book About Love.” “I listen to the message. I have been found out. I puke into a recycling bin. And then I start to cry. Why was I crying? I had been caught in a lie, a desperate attempt to conceal my mistakes. And now it was clear that, within 24 hours, my fall would begin. I would lose my job and my reputation. My private shame would become public.”
Mr. Lehrer, then a 31-year-old wunderkind of the journalism and publishing worlds, had fabricated quotes from Bob Dylan and recycled his own work from one publication to another, and he subsequently lost his prestigious position at The New Yorker. His publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, quickly removed print copies of his best-selling book “Imagine: How Creativity Works” from bookshelves and from online retailers.
Since then, Mr. Lehrer has remained mostly quiet, appearing onstage in February at a seminar sponsored by the Knight Foundation. (The foundation, whose stated mission includes supporting “quality journalism,” later apologized for paying him an eye-popping $20,000 speaker’s fee.)
Liberally quoting from Jane Austen, Philip Larkin, Shakespeare, Erasmus, Darwin and Sartre (“Hell is other people”), Mr. Lehrer outlines a book with a style that resembles the pop-science titles that helped make him famous: “Imagine,” “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist.”
“Careers fall apart; homes fall down; we give away what we don’t want and sell what we can’t afford,” he wrote. “And yet, if we are lucky, such losses reveal what remains. When we are stripped of what we wanted, we see what we will always need: those people who love us, even after the fall.”
On the cover page of the heavily footnoted proposal, the book is described as 80,000 words long. The manuscript will be delivered in November 2014, the proposal says.
“This book is about what has lasted in my own life,” he wrote. “I wanted to write it down so that I would not forget; so that, one day, I might tell my young daughter what I’ve learned.”
“If I’ve learned anything from writing these words, it’s that love matters,” he wrote in the proposal’s coda. “It matters more than I ever thought possible.”
The proposal was sent to publishers by the Wylie Agency, Mr. Lehrer’s literary representatives. When reached for comment, Andrew Wylie said, “I will talk to you if you tell me where you got the proposal.” Told that The Times does not discuss sourcing, he declined to comment further.
The journalist Michael Moynihan discovered Mr. Lehrer’s fabrications of Dylan quotes in an article published in Tablet magazine last year. After initially denying any wrongdoing, Mr. Lehrer eventually released a statement of apology through his publisher.
“The lies are over now,” he said in the statement. “I understand the gravity of my position. I want to apologize to everyone I have let down, especially my editors and readers.”
He added, “I will do my best to correct the record and ensure that my misquotations and mistakes are fixed. I have resigned my position as staff writer at The New Yorker.”
Browbeat, Slate’s culture blog, reported on Tuesday that Mr. Lehrer was circulating a book.
In the proposal’s introduction, Mr. Lehrer describes leaving St. Louis, his “suit and shirt stained with sweat and vomit,” and returning home.
“I open the front door and take off my dirty shirt and weep on the shoulder of my wife,” he wrote. “My wife is caring but confused: How the hell could I be so reckless? I have no good answers.”
Lori Glazer, a spokeswoman for Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, said the publisher had not received the proposal. Asked if her company would consider publishing Mr. Lehrer again, she said: “There is a higher bar to clear because of everything we found in the previous two books, but we would never prejudge.”
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/07/business/media/after-his-fall-jonah-lehrer-shops-a-book-on-the-power-of-love.html?partner=rss&emc=rss