"I was stunned to find two dozen instances of lifting from "Born Confused" in the "Opal Mehta" book ... I also drew largely from autobiography to tell the story of my 17-year-old Indian American Jersey girl, Dimple Lala. And I hadn't read any books I could recall with a South Asian American teen protagonist at that point (I wrote "Born Confused" in 2000/2001 and it launched in 2002). To the best of my knowledge "Born Confused" was the first book with a US female teen desi heroine; that was one of the reasons my publisher wanted it, and it is certainly one of the reasons I wrote it ... And so I was extremely surprised to find that the majority, though not all, of the passages in "Opal Mehta" taken from "Born Confused" are those dealing with descriptions of various aspects of South Asian culture (food, dress, locale, even memories of India, etc.) and the way that culture is expressed in America; essentially every scene of "Opal Mehta" that deals with any aspect of South Asian culture in more than passing detail has lifted something from "Born Confused". One would think that these kinds of cultural details at least could have been drawn from Ms. Viswanathan's personal experience, given our similar cultural backgrounds (and the similar cultural backgrounds and ages of our protagonists)."