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Augusta Britt was just 16 when she met a 42-year-old Cormac McCarthy at a Tuscon motel pool. At the time, she was in and out of foster care—where she encountered a lot of abuse and inappropriate attention from men—and saw in McCarthy some sense of security.
In a recent interview with Vanity Fair, she recounts their longstanding relationship, which inspired a number of the highly acclaimed author’s stories and characters. Some of the characters seem to mirror the inappropriate power dynamic that existed between Britt and McCarthy.
And, despite her slight discomfort with fully labelling McCarthy a groomer—though she calls him one twice during the interview, and details how the police were after him for statutory rape (she was 17 and he 43) and human trafficking—she does feel like he violated her at least in an emotional sense.
When he sent her the manuscript for All the Pretty Horses, she expressed how seeing so much of her trauma on the page felt hurtful.
“The first thing I see, obviously, is the title. And I thought, Oh my gosh. I started reading it, and it’s just so full of me, and yet isn’t me. It was so confusing. Reading about Blevins getting killed was so sad. 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.”
McCarthy isn’t the only one who should be looked at with a side eye here, though. The overall tone of the Vanity Fair article is off. At times, it feels like it unnecessarily legitimizes McCarthy’s relationship and attraction to the teenager by saying things like “When he was 42, Cormac McCarthy fell in love with a 16-year-old girl,” and it sympathizes with McCarthy’s “dilemma” of having “a beautiful 16-year-old runaway” sidle up beside him at a motel pool.
It’s yuck all around, and if it you want to read the primary interview to see what we mean, visit Vanity Fair. The Guardian also has a nice summary.
Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.