It’s so fascinating about Cormac McCarthy and his 16-year-old muse, Augusta Britt. She was 16, he 42 in 1976. He was married but she didn’t know that. Much of his writing drew from her harrowing, traumatic life.

Of course it was “wrong,” given the age gap and that she was under 18. But from the articles I’ve read from Britt’s POV it all sounds very nuanced, not that that makes it OK (it wasn’t).

McCarthy saved her on one level, and perhaps ruined her on another. It also brings up again this thorny issue of writing about real people in your work. I often write characters based off real people. I know I have pissed some of them off. But damn it: It’s what a writer does! Is that a fair excuse? Probably not. But: Damn!

“Britt left him about three years into their relationship. They continued to keep in touch, talked regularly for years and saw each other when he visited Tucson. When McCarthy sent her the manuscript for “All the Pretty Horses” in the 1980s, she was confused by how much the novel was “full of me, and yet isn’t me.”

“I was surprised it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt kind of violated,” she said. “All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. ... I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a train wreck to write about?”