When longtime “Wicked” fan Cassie Plumridge cracked open her copy of “Simply More,” the best-selling memoir by one of the movie’s co-stars, Cynthia Erivo, she flew through it. “I read the book in two sittings,” she said. “I was loving it.”
Plumridge was absorbed by the many personal anecdotes that Erivo shared in the book, texting memorable lines to her friends. Then she got to Chapter 42, which states: “I’ve been a specimen in a petri dish since I was a teenager. I’ve heard it all, every version of what’s wrong with me. And when I fix it, then it’s wrong for different reasons. Maybe you’ve felt the same?”
The passage later adds, “If you go to Thanksgiving dinner and someone’s granny says, Oh, my god, you look skinnier, what’s wrong? Or someone else says, You look heavier, what happened? That is uncomfortable and horrible no matter where it’s happening.” It goes on to say, “This ease in making remarks is really dangerous for all parties involved.”
Those words rang a bell for Plumridge, who had taken every opportunity to learn about the two movies’ casts and crews, including through the interviews on the attention-grabbing promotional tour. “That was very specific verbiage,” Plumridge said. She looked up a clip that had recently resurfaced on social media — a joint interview with Erivo and co-star Ariana Grande from December 2024 in which French content creator and journalist Sally asked the pop star how she dealt with the “overwhelming” pressure to look perfect. “My goodness,” Grande said in the interview, getting choked up. “It’s okay,” Erivo told her, grabbing Grande’s hand.
“I’ve been a specimen in a petri dish really since I was 16 or 17, so I have heard it all,” Grande said. “I’ve heard every version of it, of what’s wrong with me, and then you fix it, and then it’s wrong for different reasons.”
Grande later added, “It’s hard to protect yourself from that noise. I think it’s something that is uncomfortable no matter what scale you’re experiencing it on. Even if you go to Thanksgiving dinner and someone’s granny says, ‘Oh my god, you look skinnier, what happened?’ or, ‘You look heavier, what happened?’ It’s like — that is something that is uncomfortable and horrible no matter where it’s happening, no matter the scale it’s happening on.” She concluded by saying that people’s comfort with commenting on others’ bodies was dangerous “for all parties involved.”
Erivo’s memoir, Plumridge realized, had repeated Grande’s comments nearly verbatim and without attribution. She took her confusion to social media, where she and fellow fans hit with déjà vu speculated about how Grande’s words had wound up in Erivo’s book: a ghostwriter who hadn’t checked sources? Artificial intelligence?
In a statement, Erivo’s publisher, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, said it had erroneously left out Grande’s name.
“A chapter introduction, which included correct attribution, was inadvertently left out of the book. We have immediately updated the file to the corrected version, which will be used going forward in all formats including all future printings of the physical book,” a representative said in a statement. “We are deeply apologetic for this oversight and thankful that we are able to correct it.”
(The book’s other 53 chapters are similarly brief and written in the first person, in Erivo’s voice; none features an introduction.)
It’s common for high-profile celebrities to publish memoirs with the assistance of one or more ghostwriters, and in the acknowledgments section of “Simply More,” Erivo thanks Bernadette Murphy, a freelance writer and editor, for having “painstakingly and patiently helped me to craft the things I wanted to say.” Murphy, also a credited collaborator on Minka Kelly’s best-selling 2023 memoir, “Tell Me Everything,” didn’t respond to The Washington Post’s requests for comment. Representatives for Erivo and Grande also didn’t respond.
Dan Gerstein, chief executive of Gotham Ghostwriters, said the situation initially reminded him of a 2023 scandal involving ghostwritten content: The release of a popular science book was suspended when it was revealed that one of the writers, Kristin Loberg, had lifted passages from outside sources without proper attribution. In that episode, Gerstein said, “the collaborator was overcommitted, and because of the many projects they were juggling — whether it was a question of time, stress, disorganization — the source material got blended together.”
In the case of “Simply More,” Gerstein said, “You never want to have misattribution in a book that’s read by tens of thousands of people and is central to the legacy of a star like Cynthia Erivo. At the same time, you think about the kinds of mistakes, misattributions that could be libelous or stealing someone else’s work — and this is something where it creates some mild confusion, and it’s embarrassing, but it’s not going to hurt her reputation or create legal liability.”
As for Plumridge, she still plans to see “Wicked: For Good” for the fifth time this weekend.
“I love both of these women, and I admire them,” she said. “I just really want someone to acknowledge or clarify what happened here.”
But she also still feels bothered. “I’m not so naive that I think that every celebrity writes their own books, right?” she said. “But I think that because it’s Cynthia Erivo — the way she’s presented herself and been vulnerable in these interviews — I did sort of expect that this is coming from her.” Though Plumridge didn’t believe that there was any “malicious intent” behind the duplicated words, the chapter left her somewhat disappointed and second-guessing other aspects of the book: “I just think that creative integrity and transparency, in a book that is about being your authentic self, is important.”
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