A false death in Romancelande

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Late Monday morning, two police officers drove down a gravel driveway to a mobile home in Benton, Tennessee, a small town in the foothills of southern Appalachia, to interview Susan Meachen, a 47-year-old housewife and romance novelist.

She was waiting for them. For a week, she was at the center of a scandal within the online subculture of self-published novelists, a part of the literary world sometimes known as "Romancelandia".

The police wanted to talk to Ms. Meachen about faking her own death. In the fall of 2020, a post announcing her death appeared on her Facebook page, where she often described her mental health issues and complained about mistreatment by other writers.

The message, apparently written by his daughter, led many to speculate that she had taken her own life. It sent fans and writers into a spiral of grief and soul-searching, wondering how their brotherhood had become so toxic.

But she wasn't dead . Two weeks ago, to the shock of her online community, Ms Meachen returned to her page to say she was back and now "in the right place", and ready to resume writing under her own name. She playfully concluded, "Let the fun begin."

Other writers, seeing this, weren't in the mood for fun. Describing deep feelings of betrayal, they called for her to be prosecuted for fraud, alleging she faked her death to sell books or solicit cash donations. They reported her to the F.B.I. the cybercrime unit and the local sheriff and swore to avoid her and her job. Some wondered if she existed in real life.

Ms. Meachen exists. In a series of interviews, she said the online community has become a dangerous place for someone in her mental state as she struggles to deal with a new diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

"I think this is very dangerous confusion, especially if you have a mental illness," she said. “I would log on and walk in, and at some point during the day, my two worlds would collide, and it would be hard to tell the difference between the world of the book and the real world. It was as if they were going to sandwich each other. »

ImageA text message from Mrs. Meachen to Samantha A. Cole, another novelist of her Facebook group.Credit...via Facebook

When she was first introduced to the "book world", as she calls it, she was alone home for long periods while her husband, a long-haul truck driver, drove across the country.

She read romance novels, sometimes browsing more than one per day. She had always been a reader, although she dropped out of school in the ninth grade to get married. The online romance community was an eye opener for her, "like an escape, a time out, a break from everyday reality," she said.

Over time, however, it started to feel more like quicksand. Over the next three years, she self-published 14 novels and maintained a near-constant social media presence. She has also been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, an illness characterized by periods of manic activity that can alternate with deep depression.

The world of books has compounded her disorder , she said. The writing often put her in a manic state, and the disputes on the fan pages left her seething. She knew she had to go, and s...