The following is the script of a YouTube video, transcribed. You can watch the original video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ctgp2gyyON0 

If you have comments for this blog post, you can use my Reddit page as a discussion forum: https://www.reddit.com/r/siobhanbrieraguilar/ 

Trigger Warnings

Trigger warnings: grooming, sex trafficking, sexual abuse, parental and physical abuse.

Intro

I’m going to tell you two stories, and later on, I will reveal which one is a true story and which one is fiction. Your job is to guess which is real.

 

Ready? Here is story number one: 

 

A 42-year-old man meets a 16-year-old girl. The girl is currently homeless due to the constant threat of sexual assault at the hands of her foster parents and physical assault from her father. At first, the man is gentle and kind with her as he gains her trust and gives her money. He lies about the fact that he is married and has a son her age whom he does not take care of. He only explicitly makes sexual advances when he writes letters to her, which makes her uncomfortable. But when her father beats her so badly that she is hospitalized, the man takes advantage of this vulnerable moment to take her away from her family, despite the FBI trying to catch him on charges of statutory rape, kidnapping, and sex trafficking a minor. He takes her to Mexico, and he starts to learn about her life tragedies so that he can write them down and sell them for public consumption. Soon, the teenager is horrified to read one of his books and find that he has written down her most intimate traumas and become a multimillionaire by selling her stories to the world.

 

Now, here comes story number two: 

An unappreciated author and secret genius is sitting at a hotel pool when a beautiful girl approaches. She presents to him: his debut novel. She had recognized him from the picture on the back cover. He thought no one had read it, and he is moved. He soon learns that this girl is a real-life, sharp-shooting, horse-riding cowgirl, and the two fall in love and start a relationship. He is so inspired by her that he starts to sprinkle her throughout his characters. Soon, his novels, now baptized by the love that they share, become wildly popular. She was the missing ingredient in his stories: her hope, her love, her goodness. Decades later, when he dies of old age, he is a millionaire from his writing, and both he and those who love him confidently say that she, the girl he met by the pool, was his muse and his life’s great love. Although she would insist that she is the lucky one, all these years later, she still confidently says that his love saved her life. 

 

Perhaps you recognized these two tales as retellings of the same story, simply from a different perspective. But could both of these stories be equally true? Doesn’t the existence of one perspective negate the truth of the other story? If you only tell one of these stories but not the other, are you giving an accurate and truthful representation of reality?

 

 

Cormac McCarthy is considered one of the most influential figures of contemporary literature. He wrote books like Blood Meridian, The Road, All the Pretty Horses, and No Country for Old Men. His books tend to be violent and yet poetically written, with long, rambling sentences and a disregard for punctuation. Richard B. Woodward wrote in a 2005 Vanity Fair article that McCarthy’s books have “more corpses than commas.” Many people consider McCarthy to be a literary genius, and he certainly has the credentials to back it up, with a Pulitzer, a National Book Award, and a MacArthur Genius Grant all decorating his shelves. 

But McCarthy was also always a bit of an enigma. He was very private; he granted few, if any, interviews, and when he did give interviews, he revealed almost nothing about himself. He spent more time with physicists and mathematicians than he did with fellow artists. He was also famously intentionally poor for much of his life, with one of his three ex-wives, Anne DeLisle, saying years later, “Someone would call up and offer him $2,000 to come speak at a university about his books. And he would tell them that everything he had to say was there on the page. So we would eat beans for another week.”

Readers and fans usually chalked up McCarthy’s secrecy to some form of literary integrity. And perhaps literary integrity was part of the equation. However, there may have been another reason that McCarthy didn’t want the public digging into his personal life. He may have had a tendency to engage in illegal behavior with teenage girls. (Well, at least with one teenage girl– we’ll discuss the possibility of other young “muses” later on.) 

So in recent years, when Cormac McCarthy was nearing the end of his life, he found himself in a bit of a predicament. He knew that when he died, his letters and correspondence would become public. Many of those secret letters were sexually explicit love notes that he sent to a homeless 16-year-old. Other letters dictated exactly how he took that same teenage runaway to Mexico to escape the FBI. At the time, Cormac had a son whom he did not raise or take care of, and he was also married to his second wife (who was presumably at home eating canned beans while he was sneaking a high school sophomore into Juarez).

So when Cormac McCarthy died in June 2023, journalists descended upon a previously anonymous woman named Augusta Britt, the young girl who Cormac wrote all those love letters to in the 70s, who is now 64 and lives in Tucson. Everyone wanted to be the one who broke the story about this mysterious girl who supposedly had enormous influence on the literary genius and his work, but who had also seemingly been victimized by him when she was young and vulnerable. 

Enter: Vincenzo Barney. Vincenzo was a young writer in his mid-20s, a recent grad, scraping by on some freelance writing work. He was a lifelong McCarthy fan, so when Cormac McCarthy published two novels before his death, Vincenzo contacted various journals and literary magazines asking if he could get advance copies and write a review of his idol’s new books. He was promptly rejected by every magazine he applied to. So he started a Substack account and wrote an extremely verbose review of Cormac’s work. After he shared the piece, a comment appeared that seemed like it was from someone who knew Cormac personally. So Vincenzo reached out, and found out that he was speaking to Augusta Britt herself: McCarthy’s lifelong secret lover. So Vincenzo promptly (and wisely) deleted her comments on his article so no one else could find her account and contact her, and Augusta and Vincenzo started speaking on the phone regularly. And when Cormac died and everyone wanted to talk to Augusta, she said that there was only one person who she would tell her story to, and that one person was Vincenzo Barney.

This was Vincenzo Barney’s big break, what Dan Kois called “the literary scoop… of a lifetime.” An unbelievable opportunity had fallen in Vincenzo’s lap due to some unknown trick of fate, and he knew it. So Barney quit his freelance writing work, asked for some money from his family, and, with Augusta’s invitation, moved in with her in Tucson for almost a year, talking to her nearly every day and reading the letters that McCarthy wrote to her five decades ago. The result of his year of study with Augusta Britt and her horses was an 11,000-word essay, published in Vanity Fair on November 20th, 2024 called “Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence After Half a Century: ‘I Loved Him. He Was My Safety.’”

So the essay came out. Cormac’s truth was revealed. Months of Barney’s life had culminated in this epic, long-form essay.

 

And people……………………………………………………………………

 

 

Hated it. 

 

(I remember seeing one I can’t find now that was something like: “Wow good job bro, I can tell you used a thesaurus!” and that made me laugh.)

To the people who are insulting his appearance, calling him a pedophile, let’s just take a step back from the keyboard for a second, okay? It’s literary criticism, not the rapture. 

But goodness gracious, what did this guy do to make people so mad? The two main criticisms of his essay were that it was poorly written, which we’ll get into, and that it romanticized a grooming relationship between Augusta and Cormac.

 

If you aren’t aware, grooming is the process by which someone, typically an older person or adult, builds trust and kinship with someone else, usually a minor but not always, to prepare them later on for abuse, exploitation, or trafficking. According to SafeChild.org, the steps of grooming are as follows:

 

1. The adult targets a victim, typically someone who is vulnerable or who doesn’t have much adult supervision. But it can happen to anyone.
2. The adult gains the victim’s trust by giving them gifts or money, establishing a friendship, or doing favors for them. This usually makes the victim feel special or loved, and it also might make them feel like they owe something to this adult. 
3. The perpetrator may start to slowly expose the victim to sexual scenarios, such as by showing them porn, sending naked pictures, or sending sexual text messages or letters.
4. The perpetrator isolates the victim. SafeChild.org writes, “taking the child out of his or her surroundings is one way that the perpetrator may separate the child from others and gain access to the child alone, so that others cannot witness the abuse.”
5. The perpetrator creates secrecy around the relationship. For example, they might tell the child that if they get caught, then they’ll get in trouble with the law, or they might say that if they’re caught, then the child will be sent back to an abusive situation like foster care or an abusive parent.
6. Then, the final steps of grooming are initiating sexual contact and controlling the relationship so that they remain undiscovered.

 

I’m sure it all sounds straightforward enough when I describe it that way. But I have to warn you that this essay (and this whole situation) has a certain complicated reality to it, which is that Augusta, despite being in her mid-60s now, is still in love with Cormac.

She still talks about him like her hero, and it’s clear that she is reeling and shell-shocked by his recent death. I also want to be clear about my intentions from the jump: I’m not making this video to convince Augusta Britt not to love Cormac or to criticize her for loving him and grieving his death. I actually think she has every right to tell this story in a way that feels truthful to her experience. But the fact that she loves him still, doesn’t negate the fact that she was groomed. And it was irresponsible of Vincenzo to copy her perspective, unquestioned, into his article for a well-read magazine.

I think that people tend to look at this story in a very binary way. Either Cormac McCarthy is an evil pedophile whose writing is shit and Augusta should hate him for that, or she is the best literary muse in history and they shared this great genius-muse love but they were misunderstood by the world. But I think that both of those perspectives demonstrate an incomplete understanding of grooming and abusive relationships. (And art, to be fair. Bad people can make great art.)

Augusta was groomed. You’ll see in this story that it was textbook grooming. But I also believe her when she says that she loves him, and she has every right to grieve his passing. In fact, if you went into this essay expecting her to fully attack Cormac, then you might be naive to the reality of most abusive relationships. Abusive relationships would be easy to leave if there were no love there. They would be easy to leave if it were all bad. So, was Cormac McCarthy a genius? Was he a monster? Can you be both? These are the types of questions I’d like to grapple with in this piece.

But I do believe that this essay was a major missed opportunity. I think it could have been the perfect chance to share information about the realities of grooming: how it works, patterns, dynamics. But instead, and this is my theory (that I believe I will support later on), Augusta Britt chose a writer who was young and immature (and who fell in love with her) because she knew that he would write whatever she wanted him to write, and what she wanted him to write was a love story. Then, I think she figured, all the criticism would fall on him and on his writing style, and Cormac McCarthy, the one who actually did the grooming, would walk out scott-free. And, based on the responses we’ve seen so far, she was right. Much of the anger that would have been directed toward Cormac McCarthy has instead been placed on Vincenzo.

So I am going to review this essay, and I am going to critique Vincenzo Barney and his writing style, but I also want to consciously focus on Cormac McCarthy and the grooming story. I also want that to bring us into a discussion about how we use the word “genius,” who we use that word for, and what we use it to excuse. Because the essay by Vincenzo Barney already told us the story of the misunderstood genius who fell in love with the beautiful runaway, so let my essay fill in the missing story, the story of an adult man who lied to, coerced, and sex trafficked a vulnerable, underaged girl. 

Article Breakdown!

 

The tagline of the article reads:

“When he was 42, Cormac McCarthy fell in love with a 16-year-old girl he met by a motel pool. Augusta Britt would go on to become one of the most significant—and secret—inspirations in literary history, giving life to many of McCarthy’s most iconic characters across his celebrated novels and Hollywood films. For 47 years, Britt closely guarded her identity and her story. Until now.”

 

The first paragraph says:

 

“I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history. And before you ransack the canon for a glamorous rebuttal, I must warn you: Its preeminence is conclusive. Dante and Beatrice, Scott and Zelda, Véra and Vladimir. All famous cases of literary love and inspiration, sure. But these romances lack the 47-year novelistic drama of the craziest story. They lack the stolen gun, the border crossings, the violation of federal law. They lack the forged birth certificate and clandestine love letters. But above all, they lack the leading lady: the secret muse.”

 

So our writer lists these major muses of literature, and he says don’t even bring them up, because this story that I’m about to tell you is crazier than all of them. So Vincenzo is going all out with the love-story angle from the opening paragraphs.

 

He lists Dante Alighieri, the author of The Divine Comedy and his muse Beatrice Portinari, F. Scott Fitzgerald, the author of The Great Gatsby, and Zelda Fitzgerald his wife (although they separated before his death), and Vladimir Nabokov, the author of Lolita and Véra Nabokov, his wife and dedicated lifelong partner. Then Barney says that the stories of those couples don’t have what this story has, namely the border crossings and federal crimes and clandestine love letters. Which is a strong statement! And a completely incorrect statement. 

 

All of the things he listed that these other famous love stories supposedly lack are, in reality, covered by probably just Zelda and Scott alone. Let me explain: Barney says, for example, that these other authors’ stories don’t include federal crimes, but let’s consider that when F. Scott Fitzgerald and Zelda were together, it was the era of prohibition, so the federal law was that you could not drink alcohol. So, really, Zelda and Scott, who were both alcoholics and considered the embodiment of the roaring 20s, broke federal law enthusiastically and on a daily basis. Barney says that there were no border crossings in the stories of the other muses, meanwhile Vladimir and Véra Nabokov were war refugees who fled Russia to live in Germany, then France, then the United States. Dante Alighieri was also a refugee as he was exiled from Florence during his lifetime due to political strife and went through multiple border crossings as well. I don’t know if Zelda ever stole a gun, but she was famous during her lifetime for frequently drawing a pistol, even in public, and threatening her husband and herself with it. I don’t think “crazy” is a lacking adjective in common recountings of that romance.

 

So I see an intention in this opening paragraph to come across as very literary and to appeal to a literary audience, but invoking the names of these larger-than-life literary figures only to demonstrate a dismissal and misunderstanding of their stories is instead going to alienate an audience of readers and writers and academics. It might sound like I’m being nitpicky, but us writers are a community with a lot of respect (sometimes too much respect) for The Greats. Plus, this is the intro paragraph to an 11,000-word essay. This is prime real estate, so it has to be flawless. Instead, it just sounds like it was written by a novice. But let’s see if the rest of the article gets better. 

 

Barney goes on to tell us a little bit about Cormac McCarthy, saying he was a heavy drinker, he was poor for much of his life, but when he died, he had luxury cars and millions of dollars in assets. Barney also mentions that McCarthy doesn’t have many women characters in his books, which Oprah Winfrey asked him about, and he responded, “I don’t pretend to understand women. I think men don’t know much about women. They find them very mysterious.” (Barney doesn’t include Oprah’s hilarious response: “Three wives later and we’re still mysterious?”)

 

Then Barney writes that “Cormac McCarthy did not shirk womenkind in his novels. On the contrary, it turns out that many of his famous leading men were inspired by a single woman, a single secret muse revealed here for the first time: a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl named Augusta Britt.”

 

Step One of Grooming: Targeting the Victim

 

Augusta tells her story of meeting Cormac in her own words. She shares that when she was 16, she was in and out of foster care. At that time, homes with foster kids weren’t allowed to have locked doors. So she had no privacy; foster dads or other men she lived with would intentionally walk in when she was changing or showering or using the bathroom. So she started going to a motel nearby that had a pool with outdoor showers so that she could get clean without worrying about being hurt or harassed. 

 

Then, Barney mentions in passing that Augusta has memorized and recites Shakespeare speeches. You can tell a lot about a person by which Shakespeare speeches they memorize. So let’s see what we can determine about Augusta Britt by the speeches she has chosen.

 

First, she has memorized the St. Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V, which is a fine choice and also a more well-known choice. This is the speech that says, “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers!” It happens when King Henry is rallying up his troops before a battle and he essentially says: yes we are about to go into war, and we might die, but in reality, we are the fortunate ones. If you want to leave then go, because we don’t want to die next to cowards anyway. But while you’re sleeping soundly in your bed, we are the happy few who will be immortalized. We are the grateful few who chose to fight. The fact that Augusta Britt chose to memorize this speech says to me that she probably has a lot of courage or at least an appreciation for courage, and she prefers action and agency over comfort or complacency.

 

The other speech she chose to memorize was also from Henry V, so that is probably her favorite Shakespeare play, and it is King Henry’s tennis ball speech, which I thought was a very interesting choice. The whole play Henry V is about King Henry trying to prove himself as a leader, but he is still young and not taken seriously. And France and England at this time were on the verge of war. So to mock King Henry, the Prince of France travels to England and gives him a gift, and that gift is tennis balls. And the message from France is that King Henry should stick to child games because he is still too immature to go to war. It would be like giving your young opponent a pacifier as a gift the night before a big game to mock them and belittle them. 

 

So King Henry turns to the Prince of France and he says thank you so much for this gift, I’m going to take my racket and these tennis balls and I’m going to hit the French king’s crown right off his head. And, yes, I was childish and irresponsible when I was a young man, but don’t worry, I’ll be perfectly dignified when I sit on the throne… of France. And he ends the speech with this powerful threat, basically saying, “What a good joke. I’m sure it will be very funny when your country has thousands of widows and grieving mothers and castles burned to the ground and someday you’ll look up and realize that your joke never made anyone laugh, but it made your entire country cry.” 

 

The fact that Augusta Britt was so moved by this speech that she chose to memorize it tells me that it spoke to her, and I can see what might appeal to her about it. For example, this sounds like someone who knows what it feels like to be underestimated. This sounds like someone who has perhaps a lot of rage and frustration as a result of being made a joke of and not being taken seriously. And I love the lines “How he comes o’er us with our wilder days,/ Not measuring what use we made of them,” meaning “You mock me for my wild days without realizing what I learned from them.” 

 

So Vincenzo Barney and Augusta Britt are driving in an Escalade that Cormac McCarthy bought for her. And Augusta tells Vincenzo Barney this story about how she had bought this beat-up paperback version of McCarthy’s debut novel, The Orchard Keeper, which was not a popular or well-known book, for five cents in a bin outside of the bookstore. (Remember these details because they will become relevant later when people start questioning the validity of this story.) And she’s showering at the motel outdoor pool one day in 1976, and she sees Cormac McCarthy and recognizes him from the back cover of the book she’s reading. So the next day, she approaches him with the book so that he can sign it, but when she approaches him, she also has a gun holstered on her hip, which she had stolen from the manager of her foster home. And she says that Cormac said to her, “Little lady, are you going to shoot me?” and she said “No, I was wondering if you would sign my book.” And he said, “I’m surprised anybody read that book, let alone a teenage girl, but I would be delighted to sign it.” And while he was signing her book, he asked her why she was carrying a gun.

 

So then, Augusta tells Cormac her backstory. She had a normal childhood until she was 11, when her family moved to a little wild-west border town in Arizona. And something happened to her family there, something that she’s not comfortable sharing publicly. However, it traumatized her entire family and caused her father to develop an alcohol addiction, and her father also started to physically abuse her when he drank. She said that she thinks he did this because she reminded him of the traumatic event. 

 

So from the ages of 11 to 16, she was passed between foster homes and her real home. And her foster homes had a lot of issues as well. She had foster parents who were physically abusive and sexually abusive, but any time she was sent back home, her presence would again throw her father into fits of rage, and he would beat her horribly, sometimes putting her in the hospital. Then we have a quote from Augusta: 

 

“I would not have been able to articulate it at the time, but it just seemed like I was the problem, because if I wasn’t around, then my parents didn’t have to be reminded of what had happened to us all. And I very much internalized everything because that’s what kids do. In the absence of an explanation, you look for an answer to why things happened. And the answer I kept coming up with was, I must have been bad. And if I could just find a way to be good again, then everything would be okay.” Then she says of her father, “I never blamed him. He did the best he could.” So she is very forgiving, which can be considered a relevant quality when we get into the Cormac story and her perspective on it. 

 

So Augusta Britt started dissociating, even for weeks at a time, until eventually she decided that she wasn’t going to be hit anymore, not by him or anyone else, so she stole a Revolver and declared that she would shoot anyone who tried to hurt her. And she told Cormac McCarthy all of this, the first time she met him by the pool. And she says he just responded, “Well, that explains the gun.” And she loved this response, because it was unsurprised and nonchalant. He didn’t pity her or overreact. 

 

Where we are in Cormac McCarthy’s grooming process in this narrative is step one. 

Augusta wore a gun so that she wouldn’t fall victim to forceful abuse, but a gun doesn’t protect you from coercion and psychological manipulation, which is the basis of the vast majority of grooming relationships, so she was incredibly vulnerable despite being armed.

 

Instead of pointing Augusta’s vulnerability or the early signs of Cormac’s grooming tactics, Barney wrote the following paragraph:

 

“Just imagine for a moment: You’re an unappreciated literary genius who has not even hit your stride before going out of print. […] You’re sitting by a pool at a cheap motel when a beautiful 16-year-old runaway sidles up to you with a stolen gun in one hand and your debut novel in the other. She reads in her closet to stay out of violence’s earshot. To survive her lonely anguish, the wound she’s been carrying since age 11, this girl has only literature to turn to: Hemingway, Faulkner, you. She flickers with comic innocence yet tragic experience beyond her years and an atavistic insistence on survival on her own terms. She has suffered more childhood violence than you can imagine, and she holds your own prose up to you for autograph, dedication, proof of provenance. And just like that, with the impatient grandeur below accident, coincidence, you’re introduced to your muse, a moral hero, a girl with a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole.”

 

The reason the name of the kitten is relevant enough to end a paragraph on it is because John Grady Cole is the main character of All the Pretty Horses. And I think this paragraph is quite telling, because at no point in the article does Barney ask us to identify with Augusta Britt or to imagine ourselves in her shoes. But we can see from this paragraph that not only does he imagine himself in Cormac McCarthy’s shoes, but that he is asking us to do the same.

But, for me, this paragraph has the opposite effect than what I believe the writer intended. I don’t empathize more with McCarthy because Barney told me to. I am instead disturbed by what I’m reading.

I don’t hear about the violence that this child suffered and think, Wow, what a badass Finnish American cowgirl. Instead, it just deeply saddens me that she had to carry a gun constantly just because so many people hurt her. And when I hear “a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole,” I don’t get excited like I’m seeing an easter egg in a Marvel movie, I just think: She was SO YOUNG that she still slept with her stuffed kitten? And to see the revelation that she slept with a little stuffed kitten in the same sentence, in the same breath, as “your muse, a moral hero,” makes me very uncomfortable. When I think about a hurt, vulnerable girl with a stuffed kitty toy, the last things on my mind are the things that Cormac McCarthy did next, so this writing really does not make me empathize with him at all. 

Step Two of Grooming: Establishing Trust

 

At the time he met Augusta, Cormac was traveling, so they would make plans for her to wait by a certain payphone at a certain time so he could call her, and he would also come back to Tucson every once in a while and visit her. He would leave her books, and he would give her money, and they would sit and talk, but Augusta Britt says that at this time, there was nothing sexual going on. 

 

She said, “It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me my opinions about things. And to have this adult man that actually seemed interested in talking to me, it was intensely soothing.”

 

Step Three of Grooming: Exposure to Sexual Scenarios

That quote from Augusta, about feeling intensely soothed, was what Barney chose to include at this point in the story, but I think there’s another quote from Augusta about her relationship with Cormac at this time that should have been up here in the article when we’re introducing the very beginning of the “romance.” Because, while, in person, Augusta Britt was enjoying the attention she got from Cormac, he also started sending her letters that were sexual in nature, which made her very uncomfortable. 

 

Here is what she reveals later on: “I haven’t read [the letters] in decades. They’re really hard for me. I have such a block about them. They did make me feel uncomfortable at the time. Because they were so different from how he talked on the phone, or in person. After living with these creepy men in foster homes, it was such a relief to be with Cormac. I felt safe and secure because he didn’t want anything. He was genuinely interested in me. But then he’d send these letters. And it would be very confusing.” 

 

When someone is groomed there are often seemingly contradictory feelings because on one hand, the attention from a parental figure is comforting and validating, but on the other hand, the victim feels concerned and even disturbed by certain comments or jokes that come up as the groomer starts to test boundaries and see what they can get away with. 

 

Step Four of Grooming: Isolation

A year or so goes by with this arrangement: in person, they’re friends, but Cormac is telling her in letters about his sexual fantasies about her. Then Augusta’s father beats her so badly that she’s put in the hospital, so she misses a few phone calls from Cormac. When they finally reconnect and he sees her, he says, “If you stay here, they’re going to kill you.” Then he tells her: “I’m going to Mexico, and I want you to come with me. At least then you’ll be safe. I want you to know I don’t want anything from you. If you want to come home at any point, I’ll put you right on a bus. But if you do come with me, you’ve got to say goodbye to this place. Even if you come back a week or a month from now, it will never be the same. You need to understand your life will change the minute you leave with me.” 

 

So Augusta agrees to go to Mexico with him.

 

I want to pause for a moment to say: If you’re drowning, and someone holds out a hand, you’re not thinking about the intentions of the person attached to that hand; you’re just grabbing onto it.The reason I mention this is to clarify that the guilt and onus for anything that happened next should fall entirely on Cormac’s head. Despite all the pushback that’s come out of this article, and despite the critical lens that I’m looking at this article through, I still hope that Augusta doesn’t have regrets or guilt about this time in her life and the decisions that she made. I have deeply held respect for people who heard life tell them over and over again that death would be the reasonable route, and yet they ignored the voices and chose to live.

 

At this point, Vincenzo Barney steps back from Augusta and Cormac and he tells us the story of how he met Augusta, which was that she read something he wrote about Cormac on Substack, she left a comment, and then he reached out to her, and they started talking. I don’t agree with Vincenzo’s choice to insert himself so much in this article. If he wanted to talk about how he met Augusta and their friendship, I think it would have made more sense in a follow-up article. But at this point, it simply breaks the narrative flow. This is a common mistake of new writers; if they don’t know when they’ll have another opportunity like this again, they might take this chance to over-introduce themselves to the audience. But as the writer, especially in a heavy and personal story like this one, I see it more as your job to be essentially absent. This is Cormac and Augusta’s story, and if you keep inserting yourself into it, it comes across as very forced. 

 

You also start to get the impression, or I started to get the impression, at this point, that Vincenzo is in love with Augusta. Here is a paragraph he wrote describing her appearance: “Britt is a small woman but in no way slight. Her arms are thin yet taut, muscular, with large, defined hands, dignified by a lifetime of living by them: holding reins as a cowgirl, setting IVs as a trauma nurse, pulling triggers in self-defense, grappling with McCarthy’s painful, mirrory prose. When she blinks, her large blue eyes seem to tinkle in crystal delicacy. And her blond Finnish hair frames a youthful face that has slipped into a barely discernible older age. One sees her effortlessly—when she laughs, when she contemplates—in all her unvanished youth and beauty.”

I usually like when writers write about their subjects with love like this, but now I’m wondering how reliable of a narrator Barney is, because if he really loves Augusta, will he tell the story of what happened between her and Cormac? Or will he tell whatever story will make her happy? 

 

In an interview with Slate after this whole viral scenario, Vincenzo had this great exchange. The interviewer asked, “I’ve profiled people who had a huge impact on me. You fall for them a little bit. That’s part of the point! Did you fall for Augusta?”

 

And Vincenzo simply replied: “Everyone falls for Augusta.”

 

Back to the Vanity Fair piece, Barney talks about the many ways that Augusta has shown up in Cormac McCarthy’s literature. She’s even on the cover of Stella Maris and The Passenger. Although, it’s become a running joke between Augusta and Vincenzo that the characters inspired by Augusta almost always die, usually in violent ways. After all, dying is the most convenient thing a teenage love interest can do. A dead teenager never grows up. Thus, the many manifestations of Augusta Britt in McCarthy’s literature are perfect in the eyes of McCarthy: Sexy, victimized, vulnerable, and permanently 16-years-old. 

 

Augusta shared with Barney a copy of The Passenger with a note from Cormac in it, a dedication. This is the first time we see, in the article, a sample of Cormac’s writing to Augusta. It reads:

 

“It’s my belief that the raw material of good art is human sorrow, and when that sorrow is another’s, one has the obligation to treat it with great care and dignity. But I also believe the one who is loved is placed under an obligation. To survive and bear these trials with grace and dignity. Otherwise all our enterprise is a creature of the fates and all our imagination and invention and care will not be enough to save us.”

 

This whole article, you’re reading Vincenzo Barney’s writing voice, which I don’t think is bad. People were hypercritical of his writing style, and I don’t think it was nearly as hideous as people say. His prose for me was relatively average or a bit above average, even though you get the sense that he’s trying to elevate it. Then every once in a while he’ll have a paragraph like this from McCarthy, from one of his novels or one of his letters, and you think… Shit, that’s good. Wow!

You want to hate McCarthy for the whole article then he writes two sentences and you think Damn that son of a bitch can write! And all of a sudden you’re questioning your moral code and you have to go back and remind yourself that you actually can be really, really good at something and also do bad things. But I get it! I mean, as a fellow lover of the written word, I can see how it would be hard for Vincenzo to take McCarthy off his pedestal. 

 

Finally after 1,500 words primarily about Vincenzo and Augusta and the scenery and weather in Arizona, we get back to Cormac and Augusta’s story, and they’re hightailing it down to Mexico in the mid-70s. Cormac was 43, and Augusta was 17, according to Augusta. Cormac forged Augusta’s birth certificate so that they could get a travel Visa without being apprehended. A friend of Cormac’s named Michael Cameron said that he helped them escape by lying to Augusta’s distraught mother when she called him and asked where her daughter was. He remembers now, “That was a harrowing escape. I remember Cormac being very nervous, looking over his shoulder.”

Step Five of Grooming: Secrecy

 

Then, Augusta’s mom found the letters from Cormac in Augusta’s room and contacted the police, or so Cormac told Augusta. Cormac told her that the FBI was reaching out to his friends and the motel where they met, and they had the make of his car and his license plate, so they had to get to Mexico quickly or risk being caught, at which point Augusta would be sent back to her abusive father.

 

It’s also worth mentioning that Vanity Fair included a brief note saying that they looked into it and actually could not find a police investigation going on at this time. You’ll also notice in the essay that every time Augusta heard about the police going after them, it was through Cormac. I want to mention the possibility that this could have been a silencing tactic. He might have been feeding her this message of: Don’t tell anyone, because you’ll get in trouble with the law. This would make her more likely to stay with him and more likely to keep it a secret.

 

When they make it to Mexico, McCarthy tells Britt that he wants to see her shoot the gun. And it turns out she’s a really good shot, which surprises him. But she mistakes his surprise for regret, as if he realized that she was a bad person or a dangerous person. And she begins to panic, thinking that he’s going to send her back to the States and to her abusive father. So she starts making promises to him, saying, “I’m really clean, and I’m a great cook. I’ll cook for you. And I can change the ribbon on your typewriter.” These promises, and that fear that Augusta felt in the moment, are clear indicators of the fact that she was being coerced. Healthy sexual relationships don’t happen because you feel that you owe that person something. They don’t happen because you are terrified of what will happen if you don’t please them. So at this point, Cormac McCarthy has successfully created a situation where he has all the power that he wanted over Augusta Britt. He targeted her due to her vulnerable circumstances. He isolated her. He convinced her to keep the relationship secret by potentially lying about being pursued by the FBI and using that implicit threat of sending her back to her father. So it was time for him to move onto the next step of grooming.

 

Step Six of Grooming: Sexual Contact

The day that Augusta promised Cormac that she would cook and clean and change the ribbon on his typewriter, he responded by saying, “Okay, that settles it.” Then they returned to their hotel room and they had sex for the first time. 

 

Then Vincenzo Barney writes: “He was 43, she was 17. The image is startling, possibly illegal. At the very least, it raises questions about inappropriate power dynamics and the specter of premeditated grooming. But not to Britt—who had suffered unspeakable violence at the hands of many men in her young life—then or now.” 

 

Then we have a quote from Augusta, “I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good. I loved him. He was my safety. I really feel that if I had not met him, I would have died young.” 

 

There are a few things that I think the writer did wrong with this paragraph. First, I find it— What’s a nicer word for “cowardly?” I find it timid that Barney only ever brings up the possibility of grooming having taken place in order to immediately refute it.

 

I also find it timid that our writer says the couple having sex is “possibly” illegal. I think that the reason he said “possibly” is because he’s referring to the age of consent and the possibility of statutory rape. Legally, a minor cannot consent to sex with an adult, especially a 43 year old, so even if the child says yes and “consents,” then the sex is still considered rape due to the age difference. But perhaps Vincenzo wasn’t sure if the pair was violating age of consent laws at this time, as those laws vary by state and year. So to clarify: in Arizona in 1976, the age of consent was (and continues to be) 18 years old. Even by the most generous interpretation of this narrative, even if we give Vincenzo and Augusta and Cormac the full benefit of the doubt, Augusta was 17. So Cormac having sex with Augusta when he was 43 and she was 17 was not “possibly illegal.” It was illegal. So let’s delete that adverb. 

 

Augusta says, “At that point [Cormac] was wanted for statutory rape and the Mann Act. But he was undaunted. I think he kind of liked it, actually.” (I’m sure he did.)

This law, “the Mann Act,” has already been named a few times at this point in the article. And I’m not a predator, so I don’t know what that means off the top of my head. So I looked it up, and the Mann Act states that you cannot transport someone across state lines for prostitution or for sex– so “the Mann Act” is sex trafficking. 

 

There is a hesitancy here, an unwillingness in this article to say what is actually going on. So let’s make it clear: Cormac McCarthy raped and sex trafficked an underage girl. That is, legally, the objective scenario here. So if you have an issue with my phrasing, don’t take it up with me, take it up with lawmakers.

And yet, our writer refuses to state the truth plainly. He says it was “possibly” illegal. He says they were wanted for “the Mann Act.” I understand why Augusta Britt might phrase it this way. But Augusta Britt is one source. This article wasn’t written by Augusta Britt, it was written by Vincenzo Barney, (I know that, because he keeps inserting himself into this story every time he gets a chance,) and it’s his job to research and find multiple sources and vet the information that he gets from them. At no point in this article does he use the word “sex trafficking.” He only uses “statutory rape” when it’s in a quote from Augusta, but he never uses the word “rape” in his original prose. And at no point in this article does he call Augusta Britt at this time “a kid,” “a minor,” or “a child.” She’s always something like “a beautiful runaway.”

 

When Cormac told Augusta that they were being chased by the FBI, Augusta says, “I was terrified that they’d find us. I didn’t want to go back to Tucson. I didn’t want to go back to foster homes. I didn’t want to go back to that life. Nobody likes to get hit. Nobody. Every time somebody hit me, it made me feel like a wild animal. I can’t articulate it except to say that it made me feel so wild inside, like a wolf with its leg caught in a trap. If I could have chewed off my leg to escape the feelings, I would have, I would’ve done anything to make it stop.” 

 

This is more evidence, from my perspective, that Augusta Britt couldn’t consent to this relationship. Even if she were older, this is clear evidence of coercion and an unequal power dynamic. She feels like she needs him or else she will die, so, no, I don’t believe that she can fully and knowingly consent to a sexual relationship under those circumstances. 

 

She continues, “When I found out that the police were looking for us, I was pretty frantic. I asked Cormac what we’d do if they found us and he looked at me, and he said in this funny Southern drawl… ‘I will shoot them.’” And she replied, ”Well, what if there’s a lot of them?” and he said, “I will kill them.” And she said that his protection and his willingness to keep her safe brought her immense calm. And I really don’t doubt that Augusta Britt with Cormac felt immensely grateful for his care and protection. I actually don’t doubt that he saved her life and I don’t doubt that she loved him for it.

 

At this point, Barney brings us back to the present where he has been nervous to read the letters that Cormac wrote to Augusta, and he says, “To a McCarthy fan, [the letters] are like the Holy Grail. It somehow doesn’t feel right reading the blue ink meant for her blue eyes.” He expresses this discomfort to Augusta, and she essentially says, “Well, get over it; that’s what you’re here to do.” And Barney is reminded of a Cormac quote, “The world’s a dark place, and there’s a cold wind blowing. So you’ve got to turn up your collar and walk on.” This quote struck me on first read as a clunky inclusion. “The world is a dark place” because you have to… read? I remember knowing on first read that there would be a callback to this quote later on, just because this initial inclusion is so awkward that I could tell either an editor asked him to put it in or he scrolled back up and stuck it in here after including the quote later on in the article.

 

Britt says that at different points, she has wanted to burn the letters, and Cormac also started writing fewer letters in general when he became famous, and he became very self-conscious about what his future biographer would say about him. But he encouraged her to keep the letters in case she wanted to write about her relationship with him. Barney shares that Cormac is very emotive in these letters, and he uses proper grammar– punctuation marks and capital letters– which, if you’ve ever read any of his novels, you would know is unique for him. It gives the impression that he saved his best writing for her, Augusta, what Barney calls his “audience of one.” In these letters, we find a man who normally writes about violence and blood and vigilantes instead writing things like “my undying devotion,” and “I love you humongously.”

 

Here is a quote from one of Cormac’s letters to Augusta that Barney has placed in his article for us: 

 

“For the absolute life of me I cannot understand how anybody could raise their hand to you. I think there is something about your beauty and your innocence that outrages a certain type of mentality. Their experience of the world is bitter and cynical and they won’t have it confounded and refuted by your existence.”

 

And I want to be honest: On first read, that excerpt floored me. It brought me to tears. And it’s a difficult reality to address and understand: that such love, something so beautiful, can exist in a relationship that in other ways is also so repulsive. I’ve thought about this contradiction a lot, and I will address the ways that love and abuse coexist later on in the piece, but I also wanted to be honest here about my initial reaction to his writing.  

 

Here are other quotes from his letters to Augusta:

 

“Been thinking about you steadily all day today. Very bad withdrawal symptoms. You are becoming something of an abstraction and I don’t think that’s so good. Need flesh and blood. Touch and feel. Actually, you’re something of an abstraction anyway. I have trouble coming to grips with the reality of you.”

 

“Keep wanting to tell people about you. Stop strangers in the streets.”

 

“Very bad pangs of missing you this evening. I think how little we really know of each other and yet I know I’m not wrong. What do you think? What if I have terrible habits. Bite my toenails, poison cats, mug cubscouts? I promise if you’ll have me I’ll give up these evil practices. Or most of em.”

 

Here is where he starts to sneak in more sexual content. Remember he is writing this before they’ve slept together, when she’s still sixteen: 

 

“I had sexy dreams about you all night. I had sneaked you into my room (somewhere) and was going to have to explain you to somebody—I think my mother, is that possible? Very clean dream—you had a very light summer dress and I knelt before you like a knight at an altar and pressed my face between your thighs.”

 

Vincenzo Barney does a good job of pairing these lines from McCarthy’s letters with paragraphs from his books so you can see the parallel; so you can see the direct influence of Augusta on his characters and stories. Here is a line from the book Suttree:

 

“She was naked under her blanket. It fell in a dark pool about her feet. In which he knelt […] With his ear to the womb of this child he could hear the hiss of meteorites through the blind stellar depths. She moaned and stood tiptoe, her hands holding his head to her.”

 

Note that while Barney never called Augusta at this time “a child,” McCarthy was willing to call the teenage love interest “a child” in his novels.

 

Another line from Suttree: 

 

“I really need to get you away some place quiet for a couple of days so that I can talk to you […] But I shouldn’t put this kind of pressure on you. If you can swing it it will be okay. The main thing is that I get to see you and hold you and love you. I want to lie naked with you and for you to hold me very tight and to pass through your being into a place antecedent to substance where all is becoming instead of done and I float mindlessly in pure contemplation of the female psyche.”

 

One last excerpt from his letters:

 

“My Dearest Augusta, So Byron used to write to his sister—actually half sister. [With whom Byron reportedly had an affair and, allegedly, a child.] Lady Blue Eyes do you miss me at all?” 

 

[Lord Byron is probably the most romantic writer of all time, so it explains a lot that Byron was on Cormac’s mind at this point as he was writing these notes to Augusta.]

 

“Do you know that I am pretty well hooked on that incredibly feminine aura you exude? You are the supreme ambassador of your sex. You shall be toured about the country as a model to the harridans and fishwives passing as your sisters—‘See, like that.’

 

I’m prejudiced? Mebbe. I know that I love you. Goodnight sweet love.

 

C”

 

Those are the only excerpts from Cormac’s letters that Barney includes. I think we can assume that he is saving the rest of the letters for his book, which he will be publishing about Augusta and Cormac, so that’s all we get for now.

 

Turning back to the couple’s story in Mexico, Barney writes:

 

“Mexico remains the romance’s period of paradise. As Michael Cameron describes it, ‘The two disappeared into love land.’ In May 1977, [Augusta] and McCarthy traveled along the path of Blood Meridian, the novel he was researching at the time and which, though it was published largely to silence in 1985, is now considered one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. They began in Juarez and made deep inroads into Chihuahua, Mexico City, Los Mochis, Baja. As they left each town, Britt sent her mother reassuring postcards. Realizing her daughter was okay, Britt claims, her mother stopped cooperating with the state police and FBI, which did not have enough conclusive evidence, let alone jurisdiction, to continue an investigation.” I think that’s a little suspicious; I do wonder if this FBI investigation ever happened, but I could be wrong.

 

According to Barney, this is the honeymoon period of their romance. Mexico was affordable for them even though McCarthy was broke, and McCarthy would write in the morning while Augusta went to mass. They tried peyote together, and no one was trying to catch them, so they were very happy. They were together for her 18th birthday, which they celebrated in Mexico City, and they were together until she was 20, traveling between Mexico and the southern United States. And that was when some of the issues started. But even now, Augusta says that the issues were not because of their age gap. 

 

Barney writes, “When I ask Britt how she feels about the parental-age gap between them, if the relationship felt in any way like grooming, she acknowledges the age difference will probably come as a shock to many readers, but she never felt that there was anything inappropriate about their relationship. In fact, part of her 47-year reluctance to tell her story is a fear that her relationship with McCarthy, the most important in her life, will be misunderstood by the wider public.” 

 

The relationship problems didn’t come from the pair’s age difference, they instead came when Augusta was 18 and she found out that Cormac, at this time, was married. He was still married to Annie, the woman who had the quote earlier about eating beans. 

 

The other major point of conflict between the pair came a year later when Augusta found out that Cormac had a son her age. She says now, “It just shattered me. What I needed then, so badly, was security and safety and trust. Cormac was my life, my pattern. He was on a pedestal for me. And finding out he lied about those things, they became chinks in the trust.” 

 

The whole basis of their relationship was coercion, so it is natural that Cormac would lie and deceive Augusta. Those behaviors are implicit to grooming, and it also really hits home just how unreliable of a source he is. If he would lie about being married and lie about having a son, for years, then what else did he lie to her about? Did he lie about there being other muses, other teenagers? Did he lie about the FBI investigation?  

 

Augusta also started to realize around this time that she was completely dependent on Cormac. Of course, she’s getting a little bit older, she’s wising up to the power dynamics of their relationship. Plus, she’s no longer in survival mode, so she doesn’t need him in the same way anymore. She said, “I realized if something ever happened to him, I could survive physically, but I wouldn’t be able to survive emotionally. I wouldn’t be able to survive on my own without him. And that’s not love. That’s not healthy, at least.” So she matured and I’m sure that Cormac didn’t like that either, and there was likely conflict as he tried to maintain the control that he once had. I’m assuming, of course, but I would be willing to bet.

 

So then Cormac McCarthy won the MacArthur Genius Grant, and that comes with a big paycheck, and he paid for Augusta to finally go home to visit her family, and when she did that, she just never came back. She stayed with her family and she left him. She reflects now saying, “I always wanted to be with him. But I had to learn to live by myself before I could be with him again.”

 

Augusta says that Cormac would regularly travel to Tucson throughout the rest of her life and try to convince her to be with him. He would also propose marriage twice. It sounds like one time he backed out and one time she backed out. They continued to date on-and-off and stay in close contact for the rest of their lives, but they never fully got back together. Cormac also never stopped writing about Augusta, and you can find remnants of her in all of his life’s works. 

 

Cormac was heartbroken but also resentful toward Augusta, writing in a letter, “I have to confess that in a way I was hoping that I wouldn’t hear from you anymore. I have to confess too that there are times when I feel enormous resentment toward you […] Baby, there was nothing wrong with our love.” (Nothing? Not a single thing comes to mind?) “You just threw it away […] I never hear that song I don’t start crying, ‘I never got over those blue eyes.’ I make lists of places in the world to go and things to do now that I have no responsibilities, but everything is just empty.” 

 

Then Barney includes this weird conversation between Augusta and him:

 

“’Can I see some of the letters?’ She reads through a few, twisting her necklace. ‘I hate to say it, but…I think Cormac really did love me.’ We laugh.

‘I had no family stability, I was homeless, I was vulnerable, I was young. I mean,’ she pauses and screws up her face, ‘who could blame him?’

I know the muse well enough to identify one of her shock jokes.

‘What a groomer!’ she says, thrusting her hand up into the air, and busts out laughing.”

 

That’s as close as we get to ever fully acknowledging the fact that she was groomed.

 

After Augusta and Cormac separated, she went to the University of Arizona. She was, at one point, interred in a psych ward. She worked at bars for a little while, then eventually went back to school and became a trauma nurse. She also trained horses, and at one point, she was married briefly. Then Barney writes: “She deals, for the rest of her life, with severe depression and low self-esteem. She is, in her own words, ‘a lost soul.’” There is a connection drawn in this article between her mental health issues and her childhood trauma, but never a connection made between her mental health issues and her relationship with Cormac. 

 

In the 80s, when Cormac and Augusta were still in close contact, even though they weren’t together, he started sending her his novels that she had inspired. But seeing herself represented in his work didn’t feel romantic to her; it instead made her feel used and betrayed. 

 

She said, “I started reading [All the Pretty Horses], and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. […] I cried for days. And I remember thinking to myself that being such a lover of books, I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated. All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about? I was trying so hard to grow up and to fix what was broken about me. I still thought I could be fixed. And this felt the opposite of fixing me.”

 

Then Barney writes: “For the rest of his life, McCarthy would make visits every few months to Tucson and stay at the Arizona Inn. While the visits were made out of love and longing, they were always entangled with what felt to Britt like research. Like an artist visiting his subject for an extended portraiture.”

 

Then we get a quote from again the same friend Michael Cameron who helped them escape (I do wish this article had more primary sources): “She was his muse, throughout. Throughout. She’s Alicia Western! There’s no doubt she was the love of his life and his muse. I mean, when you saw them together, they were so in love, just so in love with each other. […] She was the truest witness of his life.” Like I said before, I’m not doubting this story, but since Michael Cameron helped his friend escape the country with a teenage girl, let’s take his quotes with a grain of salt.

 

Augusta admits that seeing herself represented in Cormac’s work made her depression worse. For example, once, when he proposed to her, he said, “I intend to love you until I die,” to which she replied, “Me first.” She would later see this exact conversation recreated by Penelope Cruz in the movie The Counselor. It also upset Augusta that the characters based on her almost always died, and they often died in gruesome or creative ways. Barney writes: “Her mission from the age of 11 was to be good, to survive, and yet McCarthy kept killing her. ‘I thought he must not believe in me,’ she says. ‘It’s taken me decades to realize that maybe what he was doing was killing off what had happened to me. Killing off the darkness.’” 

 

I don’t necessarily think that’s what he was doing. I think that largely what Cormac loved about her were her traumas and tragedies, because those made her vulnerable and easily manipulated. If you are attracted to people over whom you hold a lot of power, then when you write a love interest, by making them more hurt and more vulnerable, in your eyes, you make them more sexy and desirable. And in killing these characters off, you offer them up as a sacrifice to your protagonist’s motivation. You burn them as kindling in a story where you want your protagonist to be fueled into great violence. 

 

It’s also convenient that a dead teenage love interest never grows up, never wises up, never realizes they’re being used, and can never leave you. Our brave masculine heroes never have to deal with the societal fall-out of dating these young, vulnerable women. The cowboys get to save the teenage love interest from a bad place, receive gratitude in the form of affection and sexual favors, and then the teenage love interest dies, taking the moral ambiguity of her relationship with the protagonist with her to the grave.

 

Augusta shares that Cormac lived to regret the end of his life; she says he turned his back on his old friends in order to fit into the more intellectual Institute crowd. In one of their final encounters, Augusta visited Cormac, and he started to cry, saying he regretted all the years that they weren’t together. 

 

In his final years of life, Cormac reconciled with his first son. His third wife, Jennifer, and his second son, John, the inspiration for The Road, were the ones who cared for him in those final years of his life. In his will, he named Augusta along with his two sons and two out of his three ex-wives. 

 

At this point, Barney goes back into a long horse metaphor, and I’m really not sure what he’s getting at. He does this multiple times throughout the essay: he tells the story of Augusta and Cormac and he intersperses it with these moments where Augusta is teaching Barney something about horses. She says, for example, to control a horse, you have to control its feet. To put the reins on the horse, you have to do it from the left side. She points out that horses are herd animals. And Barney spends a lot of words on this, which makes me think he’s going for a metaphor, but I really can’t think of any clear analogy here. He also shares stories about how he manages to harness the horses despite being nervous. He shares that Augusta gave him her Stella Maris pendant. He includes a little anecdote in which Augusta tells him that he’s a good shot. And every time I just think: Okay? If you ask me, these self-insertions don’t do anything to move the narrative forward.

 

Then, we have a quote from Augusta: “I’ve been so afraid to tell my story. It feels like I’m being disloyal to Cormac.” Remember that Cormac is a man who became a multimillionaire off selling stories about her and her most intimate traumas. 

 

She continues: “I’ve always wondered, too, who would believe me. I guess I’m just more private than him.” Here is a quote from the Coalition of Children, a Nonprofit against grooming and child abuse: “[Victims] are often afraid of disclosing the abuse. They may have been told that they will not be believed […]. [The victim] may also feel shame, or fear that they will be blamed.”

 

Augusta points out, “But [Cormac] would always warn me that at some point his archives would open up and people would find out about me.”

 

Barney then writes, “Britt is correct; in the fall of 2025, the second half of McCarthy’s archives, likely containing her letters to him, will become public at Texas State University.”

 

Augusta clarifies: “I know we joke around, calling Cormac a groomer, but that’s a defense mechanism of mine. I loved him more than anything. He kept me safe, gave me protection. He was everything to me. Everything.” 

 

I believe Augusta Britt’s mistake here is thinking that those things are mutually exclusive— you are either an evil groomer who hurts people, or you’re a loving protector. She fails to see that in situations of abuse and grooming, the most common scenario is that great love coexists with great pain. I don’t doubt that he was her safety, and her “everything,” but I also don’t doubt that he groomed her. 

 

It sounds to me like the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father was so obvious and so evil, that it’s hard for her to identify other types of unfair power dynamics when they aren’t quite so clear. She may have also simply figured that fully looking the truth in the eye is too painful, and it may be easier to just not entirely acknowledge it. 

 

Her quote ends: “Those things that happen to you, that young and that awful, you don’t really heal. You just patch yourself up the best you can and move on. And Cormac gave me protection and safety when I had none. I would be dead if I didn’t meet him. He was the most important person in my life, the person I love the most. He was my anchor. And now that he’s gone. I’m shiftless.”

 

Then she shares that she dreamt of Cormac the night prior, and she describes a scene in which she decided to just sit down and wait to die, and Cormac appeared and said, “Don’t do that.” Then she says that she didn’t know what to do, and she woke up. Then Barney ends his essay with the following exchange:

 

“’Well, I think you do know what you have to do,’ I said, turning up my collar.

She took a moment, looking at me under that stained glass Western sky. ‘That’s right,’ she smiled. And she thrust her hand out before her, the way McCarthy would have. ‘Walk on.’

 

This is the callback we were waiting for earlier to the quote that McCarthy would always share: turn up your collar and walk on. 

 

I don’t think that Barney ever expected the response that he got to this essay. He actually seemed very excited and proud to share it at first. When he first posted about it on his Substack, he shared it with a note to Augusta, saying, “I must thank Augusta Britt, one of the best humans I’ve ever met, and to whom I owe the most gratitude. I don’t know why, but I was lucky enough to be found by her on April Fools Day. Everything since then has felt foolishly kismet. Without Augusta, I would be fiddling away at this Substack, going nowhere fast. All that I do from now on, I owe to her and dedicate eternally. Thank you, Lady A. You are a beautiful human.”

Barney’s Defense 

Then the writing community read his article, and it went super viral, and people treated him like the Antichrist for a few weeks.

 

So he published a follow-up article on Substack called Cormac McCarthy’s secret muse, the internet, and me for which the featured photo is a sunset with a big shadow dick. For some reason. 

In this second article, he chalked up a lot of the criticism to the fact that he used big words, which I didn’t think was a completely fair response. I put the article into a Flesch-Kincaid reading level calculator, and it said that it’s actually written at a seventh-grade reading level. So the issue wasn’t that it was written at a high level or for an elite audience; I think that, instead, the issue was a lack of clarity and structure. 

He also essentially said if he had insisted that Augusta was groomed, then that would be taking away her agency over the story, and he believes it wasn’t his place to tell her what happened to her. He writes: “My only regret in any of this is that Augusta has had to endure the worst of the online reactions, which was her greatest fear in going public: being misunderstood and not taken seriously. Many of the most viral public reactions on both social and legacy media immediately decentered Augusta from her own story, stripped her of agency, and then proceeded to take me to task for having respected her perspective on her relationship with Cormac McCarthy, whom she considers the most important person in her life. I consider the claim that an adult woman cannot be the authority on her own life to be contrary to the very ethos these critics claim to espouse.”

My Theory

Here is my theory about what went down here. Augusta Britt is at a very vulnerable and lonely point in her life right now because she recently lost the person whom she loved the most. As she said, she feels shiftless. When someone is in this position, they often turn to spirituality and start to look for signs from that person they lost or ways to communicate with that person. Apparently, Augusta told Barney, before giving him this story, “You carry the light.” The two talk constantly about the date on which they met being April Fools’ Day as if that meant their meeting was fated somehow. (In reality, there are only 365 days in a year; if you want to convince yourself there was something special about a certain day, then that’s pretty easy to do. That doesn’t mean it was divine providence.) But Augusta was grieving, and she didn’t want to be alone, she wanted a writer by her side, writing about her. It sounds like she was trying to feel closer to Cormac, and she thought Vincenzo would help her do that.

 

There’s another possible element here that I want to discuss. When Augusta was considering who would share this story, this revelation about her life, many people assumed that surely she would choose a lifelong McCarthy scholar out of a prestigious university or a well-known journalist, but I believe that she knew that if she chose someone with more life experience, maybe closer to her in age, then they would see her story for the grooming story that it was. So, instead, she went with someone who was immature and easily manipulated. And maybe she knew he would fall in love with her, as it seems most men do. And I do think that part of her choice to give the story to Barney was rooted in grief and wanting to feel close to somebody who maybe reminded her of Cormac, but I also think she played him like a fiddle. And it worked perfectly.

 

Because Vincenzo loved her, he didn’t write a story that was accurate to true events, he wrote the story she wanted him to write, and he wrote the story she wanted to hear. And that story was a love story. He said in his interview with Slate, “I am […] deeply uncomfortable contravening a woman’s authority on her own life. Especially as a young man half her age. She has been emphatic that there was no grooming (as recently as again today).”

 

As a result of Augusta’s decision to give this story to Vincenzo, many of the criticisms have been about Vincenzo Barney and his writing style. There hasn’t really been a major reckoning about Cormac McCarthy and his legacy, which I think is unfortunate. I also think that was part of Augusta’s plan from the beginning. In that same Slate interview, Barney essentially confirmed that this was her intent by saying that when she read his essay on Substack, she had finally found a way that her story could be “told from her perspective, with [Vincenzo’s] daringly bad style absorbing most of the controversy and opinion columns.” I think he meant this as a joke, but sometimes there’s truth in comedy.

 

Augusta isn’t that vulnerable teenager anymore. Her life experience outdoes Vincenzo Barney’s life experience by a country mile. And she’s a survivor. This is a woman who knows how to outsmart; knows how to pull the strings to get what she wants or needs. And I think she saw Vincenzo Barney, and she saw somebody who, if she said “jump,” he would say, “How high?” If she said “Write a love story,” he would say, “How many words?” Maybe you think I’m reading too much into it, but I would warn anyone responding to this story against underestimating Augusta and how much of a say she had in how this story turned out. Remember her Shakespeare speech of choice: “How he comes o’er us with our wilder days,/ Not measuring what use we made of them.” 

 

I think it’s very telling of Barney’s maturity level that he argues that it wasn’t his place to disagree with Augusta’s perspective, in part because of her age. I would remind him that part of maturity is realizing that people who are older than you, people the age of your parents, even people the age of your grandparents, are still human. And humans are subject to human biases and fallacies and errors in thinking. Except, of course, for my mommy, who is perfect and never did anything wrong in her life.

I don’t think any of us are completely reliable narrators of our own lives because there is no such thing as one true story; the truth exists in an amalgamation of perspectives. 

 

The Danger of a Single Story

If you’ve taken an English class at some point in the last 15 years, then perhaps you’ve watched the Nigerian novelist and speaker Chimamanda Adichie’s speech called “The Danger of a Single Story.” 

People who stereotype other people based on their culture or race or gender typically defend their stereotyping behavior by saying, “Well, the stereotype is true!” But Adichie’s speech offers a succinct rebuttal to that idea. She points out that the issue with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. 

Adichie also extends her theory of the danger of a single story not just to encompass cultures and countries, but also individual people. As any great novelist should, Adichie recognizes that to portray a person’s motivations as nothing more than a simple archetype would be to misunderstand any given situation. The wisest people, and the best writers, instead look all characters directly in the eye, and breathe life into them by recognizing their humanity, elevating them beyond a two-dimensional stereotype. 

Many of the critics of Barney’s article attacked him for telling a love story, but my issue isn’t that Vincenzo told a love story; it’s that he only told a love story.

I actually think that he did a great job telling this love story; he made it sound romantic and literary and moving. But imagine how rich, how interesting this article could have been, if he juxtaposed that great love story, with a fully-told grooming story– without mincing his words. An article like that would be so powerful, because it would successfully portray the immense confusion and contradiction that exists not just in a grooming relationship, but in any abusive relationship, in which victims often find themselves wondering, how could someone who has brought me so much joy, also bring me so much pain?

I have a friend who dealt with abuse at the hands of an elder sibling. And I’ve gotten permission to share this story if I change certain identifying details. This friend had opened up to me about the abuse at the hands of her older brother that happened during their teenage years. And I had classified her older brother in my head as a villain. I actually, to be honest, hated him for what he did to my friend. And when you’re on the outside of an abusive situation, it’s easy to feel that way and it’s easy to paint the abuser as some kind of cruel, one-dimensional being. Then one day, my friend started telling me stories about her childhood with her brother and these stories confounded me, because the siblings were playing together and sharing inside jokes, and they sounded like best friends. So, confused, I said, “Are you talking about [Name]?” And she said, “Yes.” And I said, “But I thought he was horribly abusive.” And she said, “He was.” And in my infinite wisdom, I asked, “But you loved him?” And she looked at me, and she said, “Of course. Why do you think the abuse hurt so much?”

There is a controversial book called “The Trauma Myth” by Dr. Susan A. Clancy, and one “myth” she addresses is this idea that sexual abuse always feels deeply traumatic in the moment. She points out in this book that sexual abuse usually comes from someone who the victim trusted and cared about and even loved, so it’s natural that there are going to be conflicting feelings in a situation like that; the fact that the experience is traumatic won’t always feel quite so obvious in the moment. Part of the reason this book was considered controversial was because people claimed that Dr. Clancy was downplaying abuse and its traumatic effects. But I worry that if we don’t fully acknowledge these confusing feelings that exist in survivors of abuse, then people might downplay their abuse or not even realize that they were abused because they think that “love,” or their definition of it, negat. I hear that mindset in these statements from Augusta. She says, “He wasn’t a groomer, he protected me.” or “He wasn’t a groomer, he was my everything,” without realizing both things can be true. Likely because of the physical abuse she suffered as a child, she has a very clear, binary idea of what abuse looks like, and because she feels these conflicting emotions with Cormac, what he did to her doesn’t fit into that binary definition.

One study that examined why people return to abusive partners identified many factors that you would expect affecting the reasoning of the women studied (there were only women in heterosexual relationships in this study). For example, if a woman is financially dependent on her abusive husband, then she might feel that she will either go back to that relationship or become homeless, and, so, she goes back. Another reason people go back to their abusers is because their abuser threatens them and scares them or threatens their loved ones, so they go back out of fear. Reasons like that are, of course, upsetting to hear about, but they’re almost easier to digest because they paint a more clear dynamic. But in this study, another major reason emerged as a strong predictor of whether or not someone would go back to an abusive partner, and that is how much the victim empathizes with and identifies with the person who abused them. And when you asked those people why they went back, in many cases they said simply: Because I was in love. 

And “love” doesn’t have an objective definition; you can’t put someone under a brain scan and see “love” in the same way you can see stress or fear. What people in abusive relationships might call “love,” someone else would call “Stockholm syndrome” or “a trauma bond,” or “grooming.” But the reality of that victim, their version of the story, is that they were in love with someone, and the world didn’t understand their love. It’s a difficult reality to fit into our heads. How can you love someone who would do that to you? Someone who would have sex with you when you were just a child? Someone who would lie about being married, about having a son? Someone who would take your private moments and share them with the whole world? This essay gives us a glimpse into the psyche of someone who still loves the person who groomed her. She sees their story as a great love story– two people who protected and defended each other against all odds. What’s missing is a genuine examination of the other side– the second story– not just the ways that Cormac protected and loved Augusta, but also the ways in which he hurt her.

 

False Claims

People who know a lot more about Cormac McCarthy than I do have also responded to this story and pointed out some issues with the narrative. 

One response, a comment addressed to Vincenzo Barney, states:

“Vincenzo, people are upset because you refuse to address the false claims you/Augusta made, which throw the veracity of your entire article into question. What makes it worse is that you’re gatekeeping, manipulating, and hiding the real story/information to drive book sales for your book with Augusta, which I assume will double down on these false claims.”

The comment goes on to bring up a letter written by a friend of Cormac’s named Guy Davenport. This letter is published in a book called, “Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner.” Davenport writes “Cormac McCarthy has just run off to Mexico with a teenage popsy, abandoning a beautiful British ballerina of a wife.”

The issue is that this letter was written in 1974. According to Barney’s article, McCarthy and Augusta didn’t go to Mexico until 1977.

This evidence means that either Augusta was actually 13 or 14 when they ran off to Mexico together, or Cormac took a different teenager to Mexico two years before taking Augusta.

If there were other teenagers, other “muses” if we want to call them that, then that would be consistent with the behavior of abusers. Abusers and groomers can definitely make their victims feel very special while at the same time not necessarily having a lot of loyalty to them. The singer FKA Twigs was abused by the actor Shia LeBouf and in an interview years later, she said: “I think one of the most painful things was realizing that I wasn’t special. I wasn’t in a relationship where it was this thing that we could struggle through together and it was me and him against the world and it was just our energy that no one else would understand! It’s not about me. It’s about food; I’m just supply. I could have been anyone. I could have walked into that room that day or another young actor, singer, artist could have walked in the room that day. It could have really been anyone.”

Groomers or abusers will try to convince you that there is something unique and beautiful about your love and the rest of the world doesn’t understand it and that’s why they want to take it away. But really getting to the point where you can heal from what happened to you means recognizing what FKA Twigs has recognized, which is that your relationship isn’t the one exception to the rule; it isn’t the one time that it’s okay for a man in his 40s to be sleeping with a teenager.  

Another issue that commenters pointed out about this story was that The Orchard Keeper, Cormac’s book that Augusta was supposedly reading, didn’t have an author photo in the paperback version. So maybe Augusta misremembered when she said she had “a beat up old paperback,” which is possible; it was a long time ago. Or maybe Cormac approached her, which makes their story of a “chance encounter” feel a bit more predatory and targeted. 

This commenter also thinks that Barney was being overzealous in giving Augusta credit for inspiring McCarthy characters. For example, McCarthy had apparently written Wanda in Suttree a decade before meeting Augusta, and he had also apparently worked with someone named John Cole on a movie set when he was a teenager and that was where that name came from, not from Augusta’s stuffed kitten. 

So people who are lifelong scholars of McCarthy are claiming that this article was poorly researched and that Vincenzo or Augusta may have invented a narrative, perhaps to inflate future book sales or to shift some guilt away from Cormac. Maybe this commenter is wrong, but I also thought that the article wasn’t very well-researched. For example, Barney not explicitly pointing out that their age gap was definitively illegal read a bit to me like he just didn’t do the work of double-checking the age of consent laws in Arizona at that time. There were very few primary sources, and none of them unbiased. I also felt that this wasn’t written by someone with an understanding of grooming and trafficking in general. Because if Barney understood more about sex trafficking and grooming, he wouldn’t have been surprised when Augusta Britt spoke highly of Cormac and spoke about how much she loved him, and he definitely wouldn’t have just taken her at her word for the story. Because if you step back for a moment, you’ll see that this story actually follows all patterns of grooming and sex trafficking. Vincenzo really wrote, “I’m about to tell you the craziest love story of all time,” then just described the most textbook grooming scenario you can imagine. 

I don’t doubt that Cormac saved Augusta’s life and got her out of a really dangerous situation. But if this was truly a loving, healthy relationship, then why is it that every time he wrote about her over the years, she was plunged into a deep depression? 

If he knew that his stories had that effect on her, then why did he keep writing about her traumas, and why did he keep killing her characters? 

Why was so much of their early love based on deception? 

If she wasn’t groomed, then why was she so uncomfortable with the sexual letters from Cormac at first and only decided to leave with him when the abuse at home made her feel like a wild animal chewing its leg off to get out of a trap? 

And remember that these are the details and obvious signs of grooming that we got from an article that was intentionally written to sound like a love story, so imagine how many more details we would have gotten if this had been written by someone who was educated on the topic and willing to ask the hard questions and tell the whole truth.

It should be interesting to see what secrets Cormac’s letters hold when they become public this fall.

“But he was a genius!”

While there was a huge backlash against this article and the way it was written, there were also many McCarthy fans who came forward to say: Who cares? He’s a genius, and geniuses don’t follow society’s rules. These people vehemently defended Barney’s article.

For example, here is a comment from someone named Michael Mohr, which was liked by Vincenzo Barney, and says: “I don’t understand the new trend of being unable to separate the artist from the art. Cormac McCarthy had a 16-year-old muse when he was 42. Ok. Fine. But my issue is deeper than art/artist separation. It brings to light the question: Are artists (writers) supposed to be ‘good’ according to some arbitrary societal standard?” To which I would reply, by “arbitrary societal standard,” do you mean the law? In which case, yes, artists also have to follow the law. We all have to follow the law. 

But whenever a major artist or author is accused of wrongdoing, one of the most common responses is that we should “Separate art from artist,” so I’ll humor it. Let’s pretend for a second that Cormac McCarthy was never interested in teenage girls, and we’ll just read his novels as independent pieces of art. Where should I start? I’ll look up some of his most famous novels. We’ll start with Suttree. What is that about? 

“Wanda is a young teenage girl who becomes romantically involved with the protagonist–” Oops, guess we can’t read that one.

Let’s try All the Pretty Horses. “Alejandra, the main romantic interest of All the Pretty Horses is a 17-year-old Mexican girl–” Oh, sorry.

Let’s try Cities of the Plain, where the protagonist John Grady Cole “becomes intensely infatuated with a blind, 16-year-old Mexican prostitute named Magdalena–” Guys I feel like this separating art from artist thing isn’t really working. 

 

And this response of excusing a predator because they’ve made good art before is… stupid, but also very common. We have different standards of morality for people whom we consider geniuses; we excuse more. And I think that’s a deeply flawed approach. 

To address this, let’s first acknowledge that the word “genius” doesn’t even have an objective definition. You can take an IQ test and be determined to have a genius IQ, but most of the people who we call geniuses in everyday life, like John Lennon or Galileo, didn’t get that title because they did well on an IQ test. It was instead because they were really, really, really good at something. And we do often expect geniuses to have some anti-social element, like Alan Turing always having dirty fingernails or Albert Einstein refusing to wear socks, and the idea is that they were simply so focused on their craft that other silly social rules or preoccupations just didn’t take up space in their mind. So “genius” is subjective, especially in art; I could call a painting a work of genius, and you could look at the same painting and be entirely unimpressed. 

Because “genius” is subjective, that means that our definition is also subject to be influenced by our personal societal biases. If I Google “examples of geniuses,” I get a list of 23 people, one of whom is a woman (and none of whom are Black). 

Part of the reason for this is probably good ol’ historical oppression. The people on this list, generally, had time and economic freedom to pursue things like painting and flying kites. Maybe Cormac McCarthy’s first wife was a genius writer, but she spent her whole life taking care of the son who he abandoned so she didn’t have the time to run off to Mexico with a kidnapped muse and spend all day writing. But I also think a part of the reason for this list is that there isn’t one definition of “genius” and we have a social bias toward thinking of white men as geniuses more often than other groups of people and a tendency to put more value on niches, hobbies, and intellectual pursuits that we consider to be masculine. We might start reading a book with an Anglo male name on the cover with more benefit of the doubt than we would read the same book with a woman’s name or a foreign name; we might assume the man’s book would be more intellectual, more serious. We might assume the woman’s book would be more romantic, more frivolous. (I do think that in modern literature, in the wake of “the vanishing of the white male author,” there is some nuance to add to this discussion of gender and writing. But in classic literature, I believe that this bias towards white males holds true.) Even Chimamanda Adichie, who I mentioned earlier, the Nigerian writer and one of the greatest and most influential thought leaders of our time, sat at an interview a few years ago in France and was asked questions like, “Are there bookstores in Nigeria?” 

Maybe you think I’m reaching, but think about it: It is rare that I hear a woman called a genius– period. But I have never heard somebody excuse a woman’s antisocial or flat-out illegal behavior by saying well, she was a genius. “Yes she groomed and kidnapped a minor, but what about her contribution to the crocheting industry?”

And the comments under Vincenzo’s article fall right into this trap of using the word “genius” to excuse poor behavior, and that “genius” always, coincidentally, is a white man. Here are a few quotes from the comments on Vincenzo’s article defending McCarthy:

“Don’t people understand that writers have always been the freaks, weirdos, intense individuals, rebels, etc? Just like painters and all other artists. Look at Hemingway [white man] or Van Gogh [white man] or Dostoevsky [white man].”

Here is a different comment from another person, “Conformity is not what we need from artists. Just the opposite. Zappa [white man], Pollock [white man], Bach [white man], McCarthy [white man]–all creating what had never existed before.”

Another response that I saw to this essay was that a woman should have written it instead of Vincenzo Barney due to the subject matter. And it might come as a surprise to you that I disagree with that take. I radically think anybody can write about anybody if you’re a good enough writer, which is actually considered a controversial position in the publishing industry right now. The common consensus in publishing right now seems to be that you can only write protagonists belonging to groups that you personally identify with. But some of my favorite feminist works of fiction were written by men: The Scarlet Letter, A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I could go on. Plus some of the most iconic male characters of all time were written by women, like the boys in The Outsiders, Atticus Finch, even the famous meme symbol used to represent “The Sigma Male,” Patrick Bateman, was written into film by two women. I don’t think that Vincenzo Barney screwed up this article because he was a man; as an editor, that feels like a bit of a cop out to me. I don’t think this article was doomed from the start. I would even go so far as to say that I think this article could be fixed.

How I Would Fix This Article

If I were Vincenzo’s editor and I wanted to fix this article, here are some of the changes I would make:

1. As I said earlier, I would have gone into this with more research into grooming and the psychology of grooming. That way perhaps he could have recognized that abuse doesn’t magically make love disappear and the existence of love doesn’t mean that the relationship was any less abusive.

 

2. The article was, I thought, poorly structured. He has these long paragraphs about the horses and the rain in Arizona that did nothing to move the plot forward.

“To tie a halter hitch, you’ve got to hug a horse. So I do, standing in the same direction as Scout and pulling the halter over his Roman nose until my right arm is gently wrapped under his neck. Lightly flicking the rope over the top of his head, our eyes are momentarily twinned in the same direction. There is an immaculate, glistening precision in the reflection of a horse’s eye. The level of detail is startling and strikes one at first, brimming over the pupils, of artistic imprecision, creative license. I can see the muse in it—the woman who taught Cormac McCarthy everything he knew about horses—smiling at me with a child’s wise innocence, and I shyly try the hitch, looping and cinching the purple.”

I know from following Vincenzo Barney on Twitter that he hates David Foster Wallace, but here’s a David Foster Wallace quote I think is relevant in this scenario and good for all of us writers to hear every once in a while: “What you say isn’t interesting simply because you yourself say it.”

That time dedicated to incomplete horse analogies would have been better spent doing a deep exploration into the evidence that Augusta was groomed.

Another structural issue is that he starts the intro by naming all these famous literary love stories, then doesn’t do much to compare Cormac and Augusta to them ever again. 

He also ends the article with the walk-on quote, which I think would have been more effective if he put the first mention of the walk-on quote earlier in the article, instead of just sticking it randomly into the middle of the article. This might just be a personal thing; I prefer when articles have cleaner bookends.

Also if you are going to choose a quote to end the article on then I believe it should be a bit more relevant to the story. Instead, the advice to walk on gives the reader the takeaway that we should not examine this relationship any further and just leave this story in the past. That’s not the advice that I would give people, personally, if I wanted them to later buy my book that is a deeper look into this relationship.

 

2. I would have cut out or reduced instances of something called “purple prose.” Purple prose is when a writer tries to sound very literary or tries to sound like their favorite author and ends up writing sentences like, “There is a sense of heat ripple to the horizons of Britt’s life after the split, the kind of interstitial oblivions between novels in, say, a trilogy,” which sounds like it almost makes sense, it’s about 75% of the way there. Slightly nonsensical sentences like that one gave the impression of the article being hard to read, but not because it was written for a high-brow audience, just because it wasn’t written in a legible way. Another belief that I will stand on is that you shouldn’t sacrifice clarity for style, although I’m sure Vincenzo Barney would disagree with me on that.

Do you owe something to your muse?

My other question that I’d like you to think about is: Do you owe something to your muse? When you are outside of an inappropriate relationship, it’s so easy to see who is the aggressor and who is the one being taken advantage of. But when you’re in the relationship, it’s much harder to see reality. And you’ll realize that Augusta Britt claims that her relationship in real life with Cormac was fine and loving, but as soon as she saw their love represented in his novels, when she looked at it from the outside, then she was disturbed and depressed by what she saw. 

Does McCarthy owe her because he wrote about her trauma? Really, my concern isn’t whether or not Cormac McCarthy took advantage of Augusta Britt in his art, because it’s very clear that he took advantage of her in real life. I think that it just became visible to her when he did it in his art. So my first question in this particular scenario isn’t about the responsibility to the muse so much as it is about a responsibility to the readers. Let me explain what I mean by that.

A Responsibility to the Reader

You might look at all this and say: so Augusta got Vincenzo Barney to tell exactly the story that she wanted him to tell. And her way of coping with all this trauma she has lived through is telling herself a love story. So who cares? Why can’t you just let her have that? Why are you trying to change her mind and force her to look at her own life in a way that she doesn’t want to?

But in reality, I recognize (and I wish Vincenzo had recognized) that we aren’t going to change Augusta’s mind here. I’m not writing this to convince this woman I’ve never met that she was groomed. I think that Vincenzo almost looked at his article that way, as if it were for Augusta. 

But this wasn’t one of McCarthy’s love letters: it wasn’t written for an audience of one. It was written for Vanity Fair. And there are possibly people reading this who were groomed, who are actively being groomed, or even who are groomers. And if they were to read this article they might come away from it saying, Wow it’s so nice to see my relationship finally understood. And because Vincenzo was only thinking about himself and Augusta and Cormac and how this opportunity would reflect on their own imaginary threesome, he missed an opportunity to show survivors of grooming and sexual assault that the people who abused them are not going to be excused and venerated; not if they’re a popular teacher, not if they’re a priest, not even if they’re a fucking MacArthur-grant winning certified genius. Because let me tell you something about groomers and abusers: they prey on people who are young and vulnerable because they are cowards. I don’t care how many little books they write about cowboys. And if abusers, being the cowards that they are, saw that socially they can’t get away with abuse because they’ll be shamed and criticized and convicted, then they won’t be as likely to do it. But if I read this article as an abuser, then I would think, Great! I can do whatever I want, and fifty years later, they’ll still write articles about how hot that homeless teenager was, and how nice I was to her. 

Wind Down

In the end, I don’t hate Vincenzo Barney for writing it this way. I don’t think it was intended maliciously. I’m even grateful to Vincenzo Barney for writing this article and giving us something to discuss and dissect. I disagree with the way he approached this article. I also read in his interview with Slate that when he was living with Augusta he finished two bottles of wine every night while she cooked, so I also disagree with that, too, next time you visit her place, please help her cook for Christ’s Sake. In everything I’ve read about Vincenzo I’ve seen someone named Doug Barney, presumably his father, arguing with people in the comments, so shout out Doug, if you’re here with us, I hope my readers give you a fun debate. 

At the end of my essays, I usually have short messages for the people I talked about.

So, Vincenzo, apparently you go by Nick. Nick, people have been super dramatic about your writing; I don’t think you’re a bad writer. I don’t personally think you had the maturity for this story yet. If it makes you feel any better: I wrote a novel when I was 22-26. It took me a long time, and I put a lot of heart into it. I sent out about 40-some queries to literary agents (which is not many; I know people who have sent hundreds). But I consistently got the same feedback. Agents responded: This is a cool idea, and an exciting setting, but the way it’s written is just not very manture.

And that’s one of the great things about being a writer: it’s a lifelong craft. We get to enjoy this relationship with the written word forever. If we had chosen to be athletes or rockstars or actors or models, then we would be all washed up by the time we’re 30. But a 30-year-old writer is an infant; they still have an entire career ahead of them to look forward to. Of course, the other side of this coin is that our competition of contracts, advances, and agents are people who have been doing this for 60+ years; living legends like Stephen King and Margaret Atwood. So of course our prose isn’t going to seem mature when compared to the other literature on the shelves. That doesn’t mean you’re doomed as a writer and artist, it just means you can take this criticism as a rallying call to go collect life experiences (and you’ve gotten a head start, because this unique experience with Augusta definitely counts!).

I really hope that this is just the beginning of a long writing career for you, and I hope that you can learn from this wave of criticism and improve from it instead of doubling down. Because if you can parse out the feedback that is helpful and not vindictive or envious or cruel then I think you could write a good book about Augusta.

 

 

And Augusta, first of all, I am so sorry about the passing of Cormac. It must have been devastating for you to lose him, and I’m sure that those feelings of grief are further complicated by people like me debating his legacy and trying to tell you how you should feel. I hope you live to forgive yourself for all those years when you two weren’t together, because your relationship was very complex and you were young. It isn’t as simple as just looking at the years you weren’t together as “wasted” time. You (and your body) did what you needed to do to feel safe and happy and to protect yourself, and from the bottom of my heart, I respect and honor you for that. If you ever write a book, I would love to read and review it, and I will do my best to critique it with kindness. 

I hope I’m not overstepping in saying that it seems like there is still a part of you that feels that Cormac protected you, and now you must repay the favor by protecting him and his legacy. I want to let you know, in case it brings you any comfort, that you did that. You did everything you could. But us writers and storytellers have to realize that once we share our story, it’s not ours anymore. You told your story the way you wanted to, and now it belongs to the readers, like a child leaving their parents who now belongs to the world. I know that must sound terrifying, but in a way, it’s also a great relief.

I’m here to tell you that your exchange with Cormac, everything you owed him, is over now.

You did your part and your debt is paid.

Now release that burden. You’re free.