Episode Details

In 1966, Newsday columnist Mike McGrady looked at bestseller lists dominated by Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann and formed a cynical hypothesis: American readers no longer cared about quality, and a deliberately awful book packed with enough scandal would sell. To prove it, he recruited 24 fellow journalists, including future Pulitzer winners Gene Goltz and Robert W. Greene, and co-editor Harvey Aronson to write a novel engineered to be as bad as possible.

This episode tracks the whole hoax: the episodic plot of radio hosts Gillian and William Blake and Gillian's revenge affairs across Long Island, the problem of talented writers turning in chapters that were too good, the invented housewife author Penelope Ashe played by McGrady's sister-in-law Billie Young with her Afghan hound, publisher Lyle Stuart, and a cover photo lifted from a Hungarian naturist magazine. We follow the 1969 release, a passing grade from a major newspaper reviewer, the David Frost Show reveal with a line of male journalists marching onstage, and the twist that confessing the fraud sent sales to roughly 90,000 copies and 13 weeks on the bestseller list.

• Why writing convincingly bad prose demands a deep understanding of good writing, and how the editors flattened arcs and piled on adjectives
• How the Penelope Ashe persona and staged photo shoot got the manuscript past publishing gatekeepers
• The 1975 hardcore film adaptation and the night 17 journalists stood up in a Times Square theater to take a bow
• McGrady's 1970 follow-up on how to write dirty books for fun and profit, and total sales estimated at 400,000 copies by 2012
• What the hoax says about consumers buying cultural currency, and who the Penelope Ashe of today's algorithmic feeds might be