In this episode, I reflect on the recent Vanity Fair article, “Cormac McCarthy’s Secret Muse Breaks Her Silence,” and the complicated story of Augusta Britt, the woman who appears to have haunted and shaped parts of McCarthy’s fiction.

Rather than idealizing McCarthy or reducing the story to a simple moral category, I try to sit with the tension: art and exploitation, rescue and possession, genius and harm, the romance of the muse and the reality of a vulnerable young woman whose life became part of a literary mythology.

This is an episode about reading McCarthy without innocence, without worship, and without losing sight of the human being behind the myth.