‘The Talented Mr. Mallory’: literary scammers, pain-for-profit, and selves made of others' by Alyson Miller in (2021) 18(2) New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing 197-212 comments
In 2019, Dan Mallory, book editor turned author of the enormously successful thriller, The Woman in the Window, was exposed as a pathological dissembler. Faking cancer, an Oxford PhD, a prestigious career, and tragic family deaths, Mallory constructed a distressing history in order to gain authority and influence. Examining the complexities of the fraud in relation to other contemporary fakes, this paper contends that impostors expose the value systems of power, especially those situated within gatekeeping institutions that enable grifters to thrive. It asserts that despite humiliating exposure, or the excoriation of outraged readers, the impostor invariably succeeds, perpetuating an exclusive monoculture in which the same voices, both real and imagined, are heard and received. The Mallory controversy emerges within a succession of impostures fixated on crossing boundaries from privilege to disadvantage and trauma, revealing an identity politics located within the commodification of the marketable ‘other’. The hunger for narratives of ‘authentic’ suffering comes to represent a form of literary virtue signalling which exploits ‘otherness’ to satisfy middle-class stereotypes and prejudices. Imbricated with issues of appropriation and theft, the fake treats suffering as an object to be possessed, yet also functions to uncover a sequence of literary and cultural fault-lines.
Miller states
Invariably described as charming, handsome, and clever, Dan Mallory, book editor turned novelist, is also a pathological dissembler (Parker 2019). With the release of The Woman in the Window (Finn 2018), a psychological thriller about an alcoholic agoraphobe, Mallory garnered extraordinary literary success: the manuscript sold in a two-million-dollar two-book deal, entered the Times bestseller list at number one, and has recently been adapted for film, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman (Parker 2019). A ‘hodgepodge’ (Crispin 2019) re-imagining of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) and Jon Amiel’s Copycat (1995), The Woman in the Window nonetheless attracted enormous industry support, lauded by Stephen King as ‘unputdownable’, for example, whilst Gillian Flynn pronounced the novel an addictive and ‘mesmerising … noir for the new millennium’, with ‘stunning twists’ and ‘beautiful writing’. Yet it is in the extra-textual emplotments in which Mallory’s talent for fictivity evolved into ‘Nabokovian game-playing’ (Parker 2019). Via a contradictory series of bizarre autobiographical claims, Mallory constructed a complex alternate double-life, including significant traumas such as surviving a brain tumour and the death of a brother by suicide, alongside more aggrandising fabrications: modelling for Russian Vogue; working as an editor at prestigious publishing houses; and achieving a doctorate from Oxford. In line with the scandal surrounding James Frey, after a New Yorker exposé revealed the extensive, if not dichotomous, narrative of suffering and brilliance to be a sequence of cynical and calculated deceptions, Mallory was denounced as a Mr. Ripley performance artist, a charismatic impostor with a long history of ‘duping … with false stories about disease and death’ (Parker 2019). In a response statement, Mallory confessed to yet further suffering, claiming to be ‘afflicted with severe bipolar II disorder’, and experiencing ‘crushing depressions, delusional thoughts, morbid obsessions, and memory problems’: ‘It’s been horrific, not least because, in my distress, I did or said or believed things I would never ordinarily say or do – things of which, in many instances, I have absolutely no recollection’ (qu. ABC 2019).
As Christopher L. Miller observes in Impostors, ‘deception is fundamental to literature’ (2018, 3), whilst the fraud – or the hoax, imposture, or forgery – is as old as writing itself. Surrounded by ‘screens, fakes, avatars, simulacra, and all manner of imitation’, contemporary audiences arguably attend less to the Platonic exhortation against the gap between mimesis and ‘true reality’, than to the Aristotelian enticement to revel in the fictional and the virtual, to embrace the pleasure of the unreal (3-4). The recognition of language as a form of creative play and of the mimetic as being ‘capable of so much more than truth-bearing’ (5) also frees the literary work, particularly in terms of its attachment to the figure of the author. Indeed, Roland Barthes argues that by removing an insistence on the role of the ‘Author-God’, and understanding text not ‘as a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning … but as a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, both fixed meaning and signifying limits are rejected and refused (1977, 146–147). If the identity of the author is obsolete, and there is, Miller contends, ‘no origin to steal’, language itself reigns and hoaxing is not only ‘utterly inconsequential’ but also ‘entirely permissible’ (2018, 6). Certainly, it is rhetoric adopted by Mallory, who repeatedly, if not conveniently, insists on the irrelevance of the life of the writer: ‘I am not especially interested in author bios. I am buying their novel, not their memoir. I view it as a sign of respect not to want to know too much’ (qu. Benedictus 2019). Barthes thus asserts that the separation of a text and its author results in liberation from singular or ‘ultimate meaning’ which, as a ‘tissue of signs, an imitation that is lost, infinitely deferred’, is now constituted by the reader (1977, 147). Yet in the context of literary fakes, the clarity of such a borderline is radically unsettled, complicating not only ideas about the construction of self, but also the consequences of imposture. Whilst the manoeuvrings of a fraudulent author are often framed in terms of the enactment of a postmodern vision of identity, defined by a protean urge towards reinvention, the scandals surrounding fakery are also trapped within a ‘crossfire between play and truth’ (Miller 2018, 7).
The effect, as this paper contends, is less concerned with arguments for the possibilities of an endlessly transforming selfhood; rather, it is about the revelation of a series of anxieties about privilege, representation, and power, in which the politics of identity are located within the marginalisation and commodification of the marketable ‘other’. Certainly, the fabrications created by Mallory seem fixed on obscuring ideas about stable subjectivities, suggesting a blurring of distinctions between real and unreal selves. Rooted in complex layers of literariness, and defined by gothic tropes of haunting, doubling, and liminality – augmented by admissions of mental illness – such a strategy alludes to notions of subjectivity as a series of narrative constructions that might be re-visioned in profound or shocking new formulations. It is an undoubtedly tempting proposition, yet in the context of fakes, also deeply problematic, imbricated with issues of appropriation and theft, of the plagiary of bodies as ‘raw material to be moulded, made up, made us of, and made off with’ (Young 2017, 434). As Kevin Young argues in Bunk, whilst the fraud or hoax ‘once meant to glorify’, the modern desire to ‘horrify’ denotes a radical shift through which suffering and trauma are regarded as objects to be possessed (98). Indeed, the rationale employed by impostors that suggests authenticity is little more than a façade or performance to be enacted is, as Cathy Park Hong contends, borrowing from James Baldwin, often a ‘delusion of whiteness’ that wilfully denies the systemic and material inequalities which inform the realities of ‘self’ and ‘other’:
The avant-garde's ‘delusion of whiteness’ is the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history. The avant-garde's ‘delusion of whiteness’ is the luxurious opinion that anyone can be ‘post-identity’ and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are. (2014)
Indeed, the Mallory imposture exposes the perverse capitalisation of marginality by fakes, who utilise discourses of ‘otherness’ as a vehicle through which to gain status and celebrity – representing a level of success traditionally denied to those who exist outside centres of power but made interesting and appealing by those whose performances neatly align with the expectations of majority culture
