A profile of literary icon Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse” is causing Vanity Fair to catch a lot of flack, as other publications and social media users alike criticize the magazine for “messing up the literary scoop of the year.”
The Telegraph notes Vanity Fair “ruined” the big reveal with “questionable writing,” while Defector wondered why the magazine’s profiler couldn’t just “write normally” about McCarthy’s “fascinating” muse Augusta Britt.
The piece’s author Vincenzo Barney characterizes Britt as a “a five-foot-four badass Finnish American cowgirl,” before describing her and McCarthy’s decades-long relationship through Britt’s eyes, which began when she met 42 year-old McCarthy near a motel pool when she was 16 years old. According to the profile, Britt maintained a relationship with the author until his death last year at age 89—and that their relationship would inspire McCarthy’s books’ characters for decades.
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“I loved him more than anything,” she told the magazine in the piece, which obscures the disturbing details of the the runaway teen’s sexual involvement with McCarthy as she enjoyed his “protection” and escaped from a life “in and out of foster care.” For example, Britt only “jokes” that McCarthy is a “groomer”—a term she says she uses as a “defense mechanism” as Barney continues to tell the story in the most flowery and romantic of terms.
Even the first sentence of the piece—“I’m about to tell you the craziest love story in literary history”—ignores that the romance in question involves a grown man and a teenager.
A takedown of the piece in The Telegraph called Barney’s prose “terrible, overwrought, nonsensical,” adding, “It is so bad that it isn’t even funny.” The primary issue, however, is Barney “seems to treat McCarthy’s pedophilic interest in the vulnerable teenager as a great love story,” the site critiqued.
Social media users agreed, with one posting a photo of Barney and accusing him of “glamorizing Cormac McCarthy’s pedophilia.”
One reader called the profile an “international sex trafficking exposé” while another wrote that Barney was “positively drooling over the thought of an exploited, abused 16-year-old girl.”
As social media users declare that Barney was “the last person on earth” who should have written Britt’s story and seemed “endlessly pleased with himself,” even those willing to accept Britt’s stance that McCarthy wasn’t a “creep,” for pursuing her a teenager, are horrified by the quality of the writing itself.
In Defector’s takedown of the profile, it notes that “There’s a sort of next-level tragedy in [Britt], depicted in so incredibly many (doomed) forms in somebody else’s words, finally deciding to share her story with the world, in her own words, and choosing as custodians of those words a writing and editing team that will send those words out into the world hideously adorned.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Barney for comment. And while he has not addressed the criticism directly, he does seem to be relishing the attention, reposting some of the harshest criticisms of his work on X.
