"Romance Novelist Who Faked Her Own Death"

[Hopscotch]

The Romance Novelist Who Faked Her Own Death
New York Times   Jan. 13, 2023

“There are many ways to make yourself Twitter’s main character for a day, but faking your death might be the most reliable….Susan Meachen, a prolific self-published romance novelist whose suicide — ostensibly a reaction to low book sales and bullying by fellow authors — had been announced two years ago, returned to the internet, very much alive. ‘Let the fun begin,’ she concluded a social media post announcing her resurrection….The fun did begin, though on a much larger scale than she likely expected….”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/13/opinion/susan-meachen-faked-her-own-death.html

Did being temporarily dead boost her sales, ie, is this better than AMS?

[LilyBLily]

There's actually a follow-up somewhere about how she's indignant that people are mad at her.

[Post-Crisis D]

Different situation but reminds me of one of my junior high school teachers.  A couple years after I graduated high school, it was reported that she had cancer.  I recall a write-up in the local paper which showed a photo of her at a school event with a scarf or head-covering wrapped around her presumably bald head.

Then, some time later, I heard she had faked the whole thing.  And, sadly, it kind of made sense because you could sort of read into some of her earlier behavior that maybe she was the type that would do anything for a buck.

Then, some time later after that, I heard from people saying it was real and she hadn't faked it.

Last time I saw anything, which was a number of years ago, people were still arguing over whether or not she had faked it.

To this day, I still have no idea whether she actually had cancer or faked it.  So, I don't know what I should be feeling about the whole thing.

Anyway, whoever is doing the lying, don't mess with people like that.

[Anarchist]

I used to frequent a forum where one longtime member claimed to have cancer. It was later revealed that his claim was a lie.

The forum owner and mods banned him, doxxed him (physical addresses, phone numbers, etc.), and all but invited members to send him to hell.

People don't forgive those kinds of shenanigans.

[APP]

Here's another article on what she did:

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/14/romance-novelist-faked-death-susan-meachen

[Hopscotch]

'Something that happens in fiction': romance writer Susan Meachen's fake death reminds us 'the author' is a construct
The Conversation   12JAN2023

In an “author Q&A with Upstream Reviews this week…Meachen apparently said ‘a Fiction Author’s job is to create New Realities which is what I did’, and that ‘the end of my life was a work of fiction’ which ‘transcend[ed] the pages of a book’. But after the interview was published, ‘people close to her on social media’ cast doubt on the identity of the person who answered Upstream’s questions. Meachen herself then denied it was her, too….

“For all the complexities and fuzziness, there’s a difference between the relationship we have with an author and the one we have with a friend. Reading fiction involves, as poet and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge put it, a willing – that is, consensual - suspension of disbelief: plot twists, fake-outs, and reversals are part of a game that we’ve consented to play with the author.

“When the twists, turns, and returns from the dead ‘transcend the pages of the book’, they’re not part of the game of fiction any more. They’re real - and so are their consequences.”

https://theconversation.com/something-that-happens-in-fiction-romance-writer-susan-meachens-fake-death-reminds-us-the-author-is-a-construct-197787

[sliderule]

Meachen apparently said ‘a Fiction Author’s job is to create New Realities which is what I did’, and that ‘the end of my life was a work of fiction’ which ‘transcend[ed] the pages of a book’.

THEN she cashed out the gofundme (or whatever it was) with donations to help for her funeral, THEN threw her family under the bus, THEN chastised anyone who complained about giving money and feeling betrayed by saying 'no one made them donate'.

Real class act.