A woman claims that she was the “muse” of legendary author Cormac McCarthy, who died last year, when she was a teenage girl and he was in his 40s, according to an article in Vanity Fair that has raised eyebrows in the literary world.

Augusta Britt says that she had a relationship with McCarthy beginning in 1976, when she was 16 and he was 42. The two met, she says, at a swimming pool in a Tucson, Arizona, motel; she claims she recognized him from an author photo in a copy of his novel The Orchard Keeper.

“He was so shocked,” Britt told reporter Vincenzo Barney. “He said he was surprised that anyone had read that book, let alone a 16-year-old girl. But he said he would be delighted to sign it.”

She claims that the two took a road trip to Mexico when she was 17 and he was 43. Britt says McCarthy was afraid of running afoul of law enforcement who might arrest him for statutory rape and human trafficking.

Barney’s article was met with skepticism from the literary world. In the Telegraph, reporter Liam Kelly writes that “no fact-checkers seem to have interrogated Britt’s assertions,” noting that “[Britt] claims to have recognised McCarthy from a photograph on the back cover of a paperback version of The Orchard Keeper, his 1965 novel. Yet the only paperback of that book did not include his likeness.”

Some observers also mocked Barney’s florid writing. The article begins, “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.”

On the social platform X, journalist Delaney Nolan wrote, "Genuinely stunned this got published. The writer is positively drooling over the thought of an exploited, abused 16-year-old girl. He celebrates Cormac McCarthy's pedophilia (he was 42!) as 'the craziest love story.' What is going on here.”

And New Republic reporter Alex Shephard posted, “It's been a while since I've read something that fails on every level—writing, reporting, and (above all!) editing—as spectacularly as this does.”

Barney did have some defenders, including writer and podcaster Jay Caspian Kang, who accused Barney’s critics of being “super duper pooper mean.”

“Good lord leave the kid who wrote the cormac McCarthy piece alone,” Kang wrote. “At least he was trying something w the prose I swear this site ensures we will be reading the most boring polite unambitious sentences for the rest of our lives.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.