Well, congrats to Vanity Fair for finally publishing something PopCrave couldn’t immediately pick through and clout-jack, I guess! 

In case you missed it: Vincenzo Barney, a promising new favorite to win the highly competitive title of The Most Bennington Grad Type of Guy, published a tell-all interview with Cormac McCarthy’s “Secret Muse”, the now-64-year-old Augusta Britt. The defining complication, which VF at least had the temerity to put right in the subhead? “When he was 42, Cormac McCarthy fell in love with a 16-year-old girl he met by a motel pool.” Hooookayboy! 

Naturally, media Twitter, or what was left of it (or what has attempted to supplant the void), erupted in a triumphant kind of final near-death scream over the chance to rake such a meaty piece over the coals for moral reasons, yes, but also (far more exciting) aesthetic concerns. On that second point, I fully endorse any and all fun to be had ripping apart metaphors and horny nonsense-speak like “We’re up early enough to watch the sun unbraid the first permissive stars” and “To the west, lightning races the tousled embroidery of clouds in pink gilt” whenever we as a herd of dorks can; it is all we have as comfort in this otherwise mostly depressing way of life arguing about scribble symbols. (Does anyone else think it’s funny he repeated “infatuate” twice? Telllllllling.)

Those who find themselves overheated by the idea of a legacy magazine publishing crazy clumsy prose may want to content themselves with the possibility of this being a bit of a grand editorial trolling (as another legacy mag editor once not-so-subtly insinuated to me, bad writing can be good and maybe even better for clicks) à la The Cut essays, though that’s not nearly as fun to think about as the idea that you and I alone can discern good prose, and certainly better than anyone on a Condé payroll. :) 

Back to the first and less forgivable point: you can clearly see the limp, dutiful gestures Barney et. al make toward asking Britt to grapple with the illegality and inappropriateness of the former relationship on her own. The revelations benefit enormously from a general “that was then” feeling of distance and also Britt’s insistence that she is no victim; in that sense, the facts of the story present as a perfect post-Me Too Rorschach test on the contradictions of what kind of narratives we “allow” victims to fashion. 

Personally, I (a former writer at Vanity Fair up until this past spring as we know lol) think I can accept the limits of this piece on those terms, but I wish Barney would have at least probed further into Britt’s feelings about the way her life and likeness were so comprehensively, in a word, mined for content by this supposed protector/twin flame/whatever. Barney seems more gleeful to play A+ lit student and bullet-point the ways Britt shows up in McCarthy’s work over and over again (tediously so if you, like me, have never actually read any of all that) than he is curious about the human sensation of that kind of capture of the self. But that kind of approach would require Barney, as the writer, to be a lot less breathless about Britt and all the access she granted him (off a Substack comment, as we learn!) and maybe get meta about his own position turbo-launching his career (or at least incoming book) on this woman’s life IP much in the same strategy as his literary forebear. Muses, as a rule, tend to be more interesting to write about than they are to transcribe. 

Reading this story made me think a lot about this Vulture piece on Ben Mezrich, the nonfiction author whose whole deal is writing books purely to serve the Hollywood IP fodder machine. Read together, Mezrich’s profile and Barney’s “profile” sure leads to pretty dispiriting conclusions on what being a successful writer entails these days (if not what it’s always been about): less so excavating some moral truth, more so correctly identify and aligning with shared interests. Tweeters are having fun lambasting Barney’s work as a “disaster,” but I only see 1. a young writer turning into an industry name, 2. a shit ton of time spent on VF.com, and 3. a source who appears to have told her story exactly the way she wanted. (Bonus #4. You and I got something non-electiony to talk about.) Does that sound like a disaster to you?