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kammartinez · 8 months

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If one needs reminding of the controversy (because all of this went down in 2018 and the internet's memory is notoriously short), this article from the New Yorker covers it.

Dan Mallory, a book editor turned novelist, is tall, good-looking, and clever. His novel, “The Woman in the Window,” which was published under a lightly worn pseudonym, A. J. Finn, was the hit psychological thriller of the past year. Like “Gone Girl,” by Gillian Flynn (2012), and “The Girl on the Train,” by Paula Hawkins (2015), each of which has sold millions of copies, Mallory’s novel, published in January, 2018, features an unreliable first-person female narrator, an apparent murder, and a possible psychopath.

Mallory sold the novel in a two-book, two-million-dollar deal. He dedicated it to a man he has described as an ex-boyfriend, and secured a blurb from Stephen King: “One of those rare books that really is unputdownable.” Mallory was profiled in the Times, and the novel was reviewed in this magazine. A Washington Post critic contended that Mallory’s prose “caresses us.” The novel entered the Times best-seller list at No. 1—the first time in twelve years that a début novel had done so. A film adaptation, starring Amy Adams and Gary Oldman, was shot in New York last year. Mallory has said that his second novel is likely to appear in early 2020—coinciding, he hopes, with the Oscar ceremony at which the film of “The Woman in the Window” will be honored. Translation rights have been acquired in more than forty foreign markets.

Mallory can be delightful company. Jonathan Karp, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, recently recalled that Mallory, as a junior colleague in the New York book world, had been “charming, brilliant,” and a “terrific writer of e-mail.” Tess Gerritsen, the crime writer, met Mallory more than a decade ago, when he was an editorial assistant; she remembers him as “a charming young man” who wrote deft jacket copy. Craig Raine, the British poet and academic, told me that Mallory had been a “charming and talented” graduate student at Oxford; there, Mallory had focussed his studies on Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley novels, which are about a charming, brilliant impostor.

Now thirty-nine, Mallory lives in New York, in Chelsea. He spent much of the past year travelling—Spain, Bulgaria, Estonia—for interviews and panel discussions. He repeated entertaining, upbeat remarks about his love of Alfred Hitchcock and French bulldogs. When he made an unscheduled appearance at a gathering of bloggers in São Paulo, he was greeted with pop-star screams.

One evening in September, in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mallory sat down in the bar of the hotel where he and other guests of a literary festival were staying. Tom Scott, an editorial cartoonist and a screenwriter, was struck by Mallory’s self-assurance, which reminded him of Sam Shepard’s representation of Chuck Yeager, the test pilot, in the film “The Right Stuff.” “He came in wearing the same kind of bomber jacket,” Scott said recently, in a fondly teasing tone. “An incredibly good-looking guy. He sat down and plonked one leg over the arm of his chair, and swung that leg casually, and within two minutes he’d mentioned that he had the best-selling novel in the world this year.” Mallory also noted that he’d been paid a million dollars for the movie rights to “The Woman in the Window.” Scott said, “He was enjoying his success so much. It was almost like an outsider looking in on his own success.”

Mallory and Scott later appeared at a festival event that took the form of a lighthearted debate between two teams. The audience was rowdy; Scott recalled that, when it was Mallory’s turn to speak, he flipped the room’s mood. He announced that he was going “off script” to share something personal—for what Scott understood to be the first time. Mallory said that once, in order to alleviate depression, he had undergone electroconvulsive therapy, three times a week, for one or two months. It had “worked,” Mallory noted, adding, “I’m very grateful.” He said that he still had ECT treatments once a year. “You knew he was telling us something that was really true,” Scott recalled. In the room, there was “a huge surge of sympathy.”

Mallory had frequently referred to electroconvulsive therapy before. But, in those instances, he had included it in a list of therapies that he had considered unsatisfactory in the years between 2001, when he graduated from Duke University, and 2015, when he was given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder, and found relief through medication. In a talk that Mallory gave at a library in Centennial, Colorado, soon after his book’s publication, he said, “I resorted to hypnotherapy, to electroconvulsive therapy, to ketamine therapy, to retail therapy.”

In that talk, as in dozens of appearances, Mallory adopted a tone of witty self-deprecation. (An audience member asked him if he’d considered a career in standup comedy.) But Mallory’s central theme was that, although depression may have caused him to think poorly of himself, he was in fact a tremendous success. “I’ve thrived on both sides of the Atlantic,” he said. “I’m like Adele!” He’d reached a mass readership with a first novel that, he said, had honored E. M. Forster’s exhortation in “Howards End”: “Only connect.” Mallory described himself as a man “of discipline and compassion.”

Mallory also explained that he had come to accept that he was attractive—or “semi-fit to be viewed by the semi-naked eye.” On a trip to China, he had been told so by his “host family.” At a talk two weeks later, he repeated the anecdote but identified the host family as Japanese.

Such storytelling is hardly scandalous. Mallory was taking his first steps as a public figure. Most people have jazzed up an anecdote, and it is a novelist’s job to manipulate an audience.

But in Colorado Mallory went further. He said that, while he was working at an imprint of the publisher Little, Brown, in London, between 2009 and 2012, “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a thriller submitted pseudonymously by J. K. Rowling, had been published on his recommendation. He said that he had taught at Oxford University, where he had received a doctorate. “You got a problem with that?” he added, to laughter.

Mallory doesn’t have a doctorate from Oxford. Although he may have read Rowling’s manuscript, it was not published on his recommendation. (And he never “worked with” Tina Fey at Little, Brown, as an official biography of Mallory claimed; a representative for Fey recently said that “he was not an editor in any capacity on Tina’s book.”)

Moreover, according to many people who know him, Mallory has a history of imposture, and of duping people with false stories about disease and death. Long before he wrote fiction professionally, Mallory was experimenting with gothic personal fictions, apparently designed to get attention, bring him advancement, or to explain away failings. “Money and power were important to him,” a former publishing colleague told me. “But so was drama, and securing people’s sympathies.”

In 2001, Jeffrey Archer, the British novelist, began a two-year prison sentence for perjury and perverting the course of justice. Nobody has accused Dan Mallory of breaking the law, or of lying under oath, but his behavior has struck many as calculated and extreme. The former colleague said that Mallory was “clever and careful” in his “ruthless” deceptions: “If there was something that he wanted and there was a way he could position himself to get it, he would. If there was a story to tell that would help him, he would tell it.” This doesn’t look like poetic license, ordinary cockiness, or Nabokovian game-playing; nor is it behavior associated with bipolar II disorder.

In 2016, midway through the auction for “The Woman in the Window,” the author’s real name was revealed to bidders. At that point, most publishing houses dropped out. This move reflected an industry-wide unease with Mallory that never became public, and that did not stand in the way of his enrichment: William Morrow, Mallory’s employer at the time, kept bidding, and bought his book.

Mallory had by then spent a decade in publishing, in London and New York, and many people in the profession had heard rumors about him, including the suggestion that he had left jobs under peculiar circumstances. Several former colleagues of Mallory’s who were interviewed for this article recalled feeling deeply unnerved by him. One, in London, said, “He exploited people who were sweet-natured.” A colleague at William Morrow told friends, “There’s this guy in my office who’s got a ‘Talented Mr. Ripley’ thing going on.” In 2013, Sophie Hannah, the esteemed British crime-fiction writer, whose work includes the sanctioned continuation of Agatha Christie’s series of detective novels, was one of Mallory’s authors; she came to distrust accounts that he had given about being gravely ill.

I recently called a senior editor at a New York publishing company to discuss the experience of working with Mallory. “My God,” the editor said, with a laugh. “I knew I’d get this call. I didn’t know if it would be you or the F.B.I.”

Craig Raine taught English literature at New College, Oxford, for twenty years, until his retirement, in 2010. Every spring, he read applications from students who, having been accepted by Oxford to pursue a doctorate in English, hoped to be attached to New College during their studies. A decade or so ago, Raine read an application from Dan Mallory, which described a proposed thesis on homoeroticism in Patricia Highsmith’s fiction. Unusually, the application included an extended personal statement.

Raine, telling me about the essay during a phone conversation a few months ago, called it an astonishing piece of writing that described almost unbearable family suffering. The essay sought to explain why Mallory’s performance as a master’s student at Oxford, a few years earlier, had been good but not brilliant. Mallory said that his studies had been disrupted by visits to America, to nurse his mother, who had breast cancer. Raine recalled, “He had a brother, who was mentally disadvantaged, and also had cystic fibrosis. The brother died while being nursed by him. And Dan was supporting the family as well. And the mother gradually died.” According to Raine, Mallory had described how his mother rejected the idea of suffering without complaint. Mallory often read aloud to her the passage in “Little Women” in which Beth dies, with meek, tidy stoicism, so that his mother “could sneer at it, basically.”

Raine went on, “At some point, when Dan was nursing her, he got a brain tumor, which he didn’t tell her about, because he thought it would be upsetting to her. And, evidently, that sort of cleared up. And then she died. The brother had already died.”

Raine admired the essay because it “knew it was moving but didn’t exaggerate—it was written calmly.” Raine is the longtime editor of Areté, a literary magazine, and he not only helped Mallory secure a place at New College; he invited him to expand the essay for publication. “He worked at it for a couple of months,” Raine said. “Then he said that, after all, he didn’t think he could do it.” Mallory explained that his mother, a private person, might have preferred that he not publish. Instead, he reviewed a collection of essays by the poet Geoffrey Hill.

Pamela Mallory, Dan’s mother, does seem to be a private person: her Instagram account is locked. When I briefly met her, some weeks after I’d spoken to Raine, she declined to be interviewed. She lives for at least part of the year in a large house in Amagansett, near the Devon Yacht Club, where a celebratory lunch was held for Mallory last year. (On Instagram, he once posted a video clip of the club’s exterior, captioned, “The first rule of yacht club is: you do not talk about yacht club.”) In 2013, at a country club in Charlotte, North Carolina, Pamela Mallory attended the wedding reception of her younger son, John, who goes by Jake, and who was then working at Wells Fargo. At the wedding, she and Dan danced. This year, Pamela and other family members were photographed at a talk that Dan gave at Queens University of Charlotte. Dan has described travelling with his mother on a publicity trip to New Zealand. “Only one of us will make it back alive,” he joked to a reporter. “She’s quite spirited.”

I told Raine that Mallory’s mother was not dead. There was a pause, and then he said, “If she’s alive, he lied.” Raine underscored that he had taken Mallory’s essay to be factual. He asked me, “Is the father alive? In the account I read, I’m almost a hundred per cent certain that the father is dead.” The senior John Mallory, once an executive at the Bank of America in Charlotte, also attended the event at Queens University. He and Pamela have been married for more than forty years.

Dan Mallory, who turned down requests to be interviewed for this article, was born in 1979, into a family that he has called “very, very Waspy,” even though his parents both had a Catholic education and he has described himself as having been a “precocious Catholic” in childhood. His maternal grandfather, John Barton Poor, was the chairman and chief executive of R.K.O. General, which owned TV and radio stations. Mallory was perhaps referring to Poor when, as an undergraduate at Duke, he wrote in a student paper that, at the age of nine, he had “slammed the keyboard cover of my grandfather’s Steinway onto my exposed penis.” The article continued, “As I beheld the flushed member pinned against the ivories like the snakeling in Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, I immediately feared my urinating days were over.”

Dan and Jake Mallory have two sisters, Hope and Elizabeth. When Dan was nine or so, the family moved from Garden City, on Long Island, to Virginia, and then to Charlotte, where he attended Charlotte Latin, a private school. The family spent summers in Amagansett. In interviews, Mallory has sometimes joked that he was unpopular as a teen-ager, but Matt Cloud, a Charlotte Latin classmate, recently told me, by e-mail, that “Dan’s the best,” and was “a stellar performer” in a school production of “Arsenic and Old Lace.”

In 1999, at the end of Mallory’s sophomore year in college, he published an article in the Duke Chronicle which purported to describe events that had occurred a few years earlier, when he was seventeen; he wrote that he was then living in a single-parent household. The piece, titled “Take Full Advantage of Suffering,” began:

From a dim corner of her hospital room I surveyed the patient, who appeared, tucked primly under the crisp sheets, not so much recouping from surgery as steeped in a late-evening reverie. Her blank face registered none of the pristine grimness which so often pervades medical environs; hopeful hints of rose could be discerned in her pale skin; and with each gentle inhalation, her chest lifted slowly but reassuringly heavenward. Mine, by contrast, palpitated so furiously that I braced myself for cardiac arrest. I do not know whether she spied me as I gazed downward, contemplating the unjustly colloquial sound of “lumpectomy,” or if some primally maternal instinct alerted her to my presence, but in a coarse, ragged voice, she breathed my name: “Dan.”

His mother, he wrote, urged him “to write to your colleges and tell them your mother has cancer.” Mallory said that he complied, adding, “I hardly feel I capitalized on tragedy—rather, I merely squeezed lemonade from the proverbial lemons.” In college applications, he noted, “I lamented, in the sweeping, tragic prose of a Brontë sister, the unsettling darkness of the master bedroom, where my mother, reeling from bombardments of chemotherapy, lay for days huddled in a fetal position.”

This strategy apparently failed with Princeton. In the article, Mallory recalled writing to Fred Hargadon, then Princeton’s dean of admissions. “You heartless bastard,” the letter supposedly began. “What kind of latter-day Stalin refuses admission to someone in my plight? Not that I ever seriously considered gracing your godforsaken institution with my presence—you should be so lucky—but I’m nonetheless relieved to know that I won’t be attending a university whose administrators opt to ignore oncological afflictions; perhaps if I’d followed the example of your prized student Lyle Menendez and killed my mother, things would have turned out differently.”

Mallory ended his article with an exhortation to his readers: “Make suffering worth it. When the silver lining proves elusive, when the situation cannot be helped, nothing empowers so much as working for one’s own advantage.”

At some point in Mallory’s teen years, I learned, his mother did have cancer. But the essay feels like a blueprint for the manipulations later exerted on Craig Raine and others: inspiring pity and furthering ambition while holding a pose of insouciance.

In the summer of 1999, Mallory interned at New Line Cinema, in New York. He later claimed, in the Duke Chronicle, that he “whiled away” the summer “polishing” the horror film “Final Destination,” directed by James Wong. “We need a young person like you to sex it up,” Mallory recalled being told. Wong told me that Mallory did not work on the script.

Mallory spent his junior year abroad, at Oxford, and the experience “changed my attitude toward life,” he told Duke Today in 2001. “I discovered British youth culture, went out clubbing. . . . I learned it was O.K. to have fun.” While there, he published a dispatch, in the Duke student publication TowerView, describing an encounter with a would-be mugger, who asked him, “Want me to shoot your motherfucking mouth off?” Mallory responded with witty aplomb, and the mugger, cowed, scuttled “down some anonymous alley to reflect on why it is Bad To Threaten Other People, especially pushy Americans who doubt he has a gun.”

Before Oxford, Mallory had been self-contained—Jeffery West, who taught Mallory in a Duke acting class, and cast him in a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia,” said that he was then a “gawky, lanky kind of boy, an Other.” After Oxford, Mallory was bolder. Mary Carmichael, a Duke classmate and his editor at TowerView, told me that Mallory was now likely to sweep into a room. An article in the Chronicle proposed that “being center stage is a joy for Mallory.” He directed plays, which were well received, and he became a film critic for the Chronicle. He ruled that Matt Damon had been “miserably graceless” as the star of “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”

In 2001, Mallory was the student speaker at Duke’s commencement. As in his cancer article, he made a debater’s case for temerity, in part by deploying temerity. He called himself a “novelist,” and said that he had missed out on a Rhodes Scholarship only because he’d been too cutely candid in an interview: when asked what made him laugh, he’d said, “My dog,” rather than something rarefied. He described talking his way into the thesis program of Duke’s English Department, despite not having done the qualifying work. He compared his stubborn “attitude” on this matter to struggles over civil rights. In college, he said, “I had honed my personality to a fine lance, and could deploy my character as I did my intellect.”

“The Woman in the Window” is narrated by Anna Fox, an agoraphobic middle-aged woman, living alone in a Harlem brownstone, who believes that she has witnessed a violent act occurring in a neighbor’s living room. Early in 2018, when Mallory began promoting the novel, he sometimes said that he, too, had “suffered from” agoraphobia. He later said that he had never had the condition.

In an interview last January, on “Thrill Seekers,” an online radio show, the writer Alex Dolan asked Mallory about the novel’s Harlem setting. Mallory said that, when describing Anna’s house, he had kept in mind the uptown home of a family friend, with whom he had stayed when he interned in New York. After a rare hesitation, Mallory shared an anecdote: he said that he’d once accidentally locked himself in the house’s ground-floor bathroom. When he was eventually rescued, by his host, he had been trapped “for twenty-two hours and ten minutes.”

“Wow!” Dolan said.

Mallory said, “So perhaps that contributed to my fascination with agoraphobia.”

Dolan asked, “You had the discipline to, say, not kick the door down?”

Mallory, committed to twenty-two hours and ten minutes, said that he had torn a brass towel ring off the wall, straightened it into a pipe, “and sort of hacked away at the area right above the doorknob.” He continued, “I did eventually bore my way through it, but by that point my fingers were bloody, I was screaming obscenities. This is the point—of course—at which the father of the house walked in!” After Dolan asked him if he’d resorted to eating toothpaste, Mallory steered the conversation to Hitchcock.

In subsequent interviews, Mallory does not seem to have brought up this bathroom again. But the exchange gives a glimpse of the temptations and risks of hyperbole: how, under even slight pressure, an exaggeration can become further exaggerated. For a speaker more invested in advantage than in accuracy, such fabulation could be exhilarating—and might even lead to the dispatch, by disease, of a family member. I was recently told about two former publishing colleagues of Mallory’s who called him after he didn’t show up for a meeting. Mallory said that he was at home, taking care of someone’s dog. The meeting continued, as a conference call. Mallory now and then shouted, “No! Get down!” After hanging up, the two colleagues looked at each other. “There’s no dog, right?” “No.”

Between 2002 and 2004, Mallory studied for a master’s degree at Oxford. He took courses on twentieth-century literature and wrote a thesis on detective fiction. Professor John Kelly, a Yeats scholar who taught him, told me, “He wrote very challenging and creative essays. I said to him once, ‘It can be a little florid.’ I always think that’s a wonderful fault, if it is a fault—constantly looking for not just the mot juste, as it were, but to give a spin on the mot juste. And his e-mails to me were like that, too; they were always very amusing.” Chris Parris-Lamb, a New York literary agent, similarly impressed by Mallory’s e-mails, once suggested that he write a collection of humorous essays, in the mode of David Sedaris.

As Kelly recalled, by the end of the two-year course Mallory was making frequent trips to America, apparently to address serious medical issues. Kelly didn’t know the details of Mallory’s illness. “We talked in general terms,” Kelly said. “I didn’t ever press him.” Kelly also understood that Mallory’s mother had a life-threatening illness. “Alas, she did die,” Kelly told me, adding that he respected Mallory’s “forbearance.”

Mallory received his master’s in 2004 and moved to New York. He applied to be an assistant to Linda Marrow, the editorial director of Ballantine, an imprint of Random House known for commercial fiction. At his interview, he said that he had a love of popular women’s fiction, which derived from his having read it with his mother when she was gravely ill with cancer. He later said that he had once had brain cancer himself.

Mallory was given the job. He impressed Tess Gerritsen and others with his writing; he contributed a smart afterword to a reprint of “From Doon with Death,” Ruth Rendell’s first novel. Adam Korn, then a Random House assistant, who saw a lot of Mallory socially, told me that Mallory was “a good guy, lovely to talk to, very informed,” and already “serious about being a writer.” Another colleague recalled that Mallory immediately “gave off a vibe of ‘I’m too good for this.’ ” Ballantine’s books were too down-market; Mallory’s role was too administrative.

As if impatient for advancement, Mallory often used his boss’s office late at night, and worked on her computer. On a few occasions in 2007, after Mallory had announced that he would soon be leaving the company to take up doctoral studies at Oxford, people found plastic cups, filled with urine, in and near Linda Marrow’s office. These registered as messages of disdain, or as territorial marking. Mallory was suspected of responsibility but was not challenged. No similar cups were found after he quit. (Mallory, through a spokesperson, said, “I was not responsible for this.”)

A few months later, after Mallory had moved to Oxford, his former employers noticed unexplained spending, at Amazon.co.uk, on a corporate American Express card. When confronted, Mallory acknowledged that he had used the card, but insisted that it was in error. He added that he was experiencing a recurrence of cancer.

In an interview with the Duke alumni magazine last spring, Mallory said that, as someone who was “very rules-conscious,” he found Patricia Highsmith’s representation of Tom Ripley, across five novels, to be “thrilling and disturbing in equal measure.” He went on, “When you read a Sherlock Holmes story, you know that, by the end, the innocent will be redeemed or rewarded, the guilty will be punished, and justice will be upheld or restored. Highsmith subverts all that. Through some alchemy, she persuades us to root for sociopaths.”

When, in a scene partway through “The Woman in the Window,” Anna Fox thinks about another character, “He could kiss me. He could kill me,” Mallory is alluding to a pivotal moment in “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” On the Italian Riviera, Ripley and Dickie Greenleaf, a dazzling friend who is tiring of Ripley’s company, hire a motorboat and head out to sea. In the boat, Ripley considers that he “could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard, and nobody could have seen him.” He then beats him to death with an oar.

Back at Oxford, Mallory has said, he “anointed” Highsmith as the primary subject of his dissertation. But he doesn’t seem to have published any scholarly articles on Highsmith, and it’s not clear how much of a thesis he wrote. An Oxford arts doctorate generally takes at least three or four years; in 2009, midway through his second year, Mallory was signing e-mails, untruthfully, “Dr. Daniel Mallory.” Oxford recently confirmed to me that Mallory never completed the degree.

At Oxford, Mallory became a student-welfare officer. In a guide for New College students, he introduced himself with brio, and invited students to approach him with any issues, “even if it’s on Eurovision night.” According to Tess Gerritsen, who had drinks with him and others in Oxford one night, Mallory mentioned that he was “working on a mystery novel,” which “might have been set in Oxford, the world of the dons.”

Mallory sometimes saw John Kelly, his former professor, for drinks or dinner. “They were very, very merry occasions,” Kelly told me. He recalled that Mallory once declined an invitation to a party, saying that he would be tied up in London, supporting a cancer-related organization. Kelly was struck by Mallory’s public-spiritedness, and by his modesty. “I would have never found out about it, except he wrote to me to say, ‘I’d love to be there, but it’s going to be a long day in London.’ ” (When Kelly learned that I had some doubts about Mallory’s accounts of cancer, he said that he was “astonished.”)

At one point, Kelly noticed that Mallory no longer responded to notes sent to him through Oxford’s internal mail system: he had left the university. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, his doctoral supervisor, recently said of Mallory, “I’m very sorry that illness interrupted his studies.” Mallory had begun looking for work in London publishing, describing himself as a former editor at Ballantine, not as an assistant. He claimed that he had two Ph.D.s: his Highsmith-related dissertation, from Oxford, and one from the psychology department of an American university, for research into Munchausen syndrome. There’s no evidence that Mallory ever undertook such research. A former colleague recalls Mallory referring to himself as a “double-doctor.”

Toward the end of 2009, he was hired as a mid-level editor at Sphere, a commercial imprint of Little, Brown. In New York, news of this event caused puzzlement: an editor then at Ballantine recalled feeling that Mallory “hadn’t done enough” to earn such a position.

One of Mallory’s London colleagues to whom I spoke at length described publishing as “a soft industry—and much more so in London than in New York.” Hiring standards in London have improved in the past decade, this colleague said, but at the time of Mallory’s hiring “it was much more a case of ‘I like the cut of your jib, you can have a job,’ rather than ‘Have you actually got a Ph.D. from Oxford, and were you an editor at Ballantine?’ ”

Mallory was amusing, well read, and ebullient, and could make a memorable first impression, over lunch, on literary agents and authors. He tended to speak almost without pause. He’d begin with rapturous flattery—he told Louise Penny, the Canadian mystery writer, that he’d read her manuscript three times, once “just for fun”—and then shift to self-regard. He wittily skewered acquaintances and seemed always conscious of his physical allure. He’d say, in passing, that he’d modelled for Guess jeans—“runway only”—or that he’d appeared on the cover of Russian Vogue. He mentioned a friendship with Ricky Martin.

This display was at times professionally effective. In a blog post written after signing with Little, Brown, Penny excitedly described Mallory as a former “Oxford professor of literature.” Referring to the bond between author and editor, she added, “It is such an intimate relationship, there needs to be trust.”

Others found his behavior off-putting; it seemed unsuited to building long-term professional relationships. The London colleague said, “He was so full-on. I thought, My God, what’s going on? It was performative and calculating.” A Little, Brown colleague, who was initially impressed by Mallory, said, “He was not modest, ever.” The colleague noted that many editors got into trouble by disregarding sales and focussing only on books that they loved, adding, “That certainly never happened with him.” Little, Brown authors were often “seduced by Dan” at first but then “became disenchanted” when he was “late with his edits or got someone else to do them.”

Mallory, who had just turned thirty, told colleagues that he was impatient to rise. He found friends in the company’s higher ranks. Having acquired a princeling status, he used it to denigrate colleagues. The London colleague said that Mallory would tell his superiors, “This is a bunch of dullards working for you.” Another colleague said of Mallory, “When he likes you, it’s like the sun shining on you.” But Mallory’s contempt for perceived enemies was disconcertingly sharp. “You don’t want to get on the wrong side of that,” the colleague recalled thinking.

Mallory moved into an apartment in Shoreditch, in East London. He wasn’t seen at publishing parties, and one colleague wondered if his extroversion at lunch meetings served “to disguise crippling shyness” and habits of solitude. On his book tour, Mallory has said that depression “blighted, blotted, and blackened” his adult life. A former colleague of his told me that Mallory seemed to be driven by fears of no longer being seen as a “golden boy.”

In the summer of 2010, Mallory told Little, Brown about a job offer from a London competitor. He was promised a raise and a promotion. A press release announcing Mallory’s elevation described him as “entrepreneurial and a true team player.”

By then, Mallory had made it widely known to co-workers that he had an inoperable brain tumor. He’d survived earlier bouts with cancer, but now a doctor had told him that a tumor would kill him by the age of forty. He seemed to be saying that cancer—already identified and unequivocally fatal—would allow him to live for almost another decade. The claim sounds more like a goblin’s curse than like a prognosis, but Mallory was persuasive; the colleague who was initially supportive of him recently said, with a shake of the head, “Yes, I believed that.”

Some co-workers wept after hearing the news. Mallory told people that he was seeking experimental treatments. He took time off. In Little, Brown’s open-plan office, helium-filled “Get Well” balloons swayed over Mallory’s desk. For a while, he wore a baseball cap, even indoors, which was thought to hide hair loss from chemotherapy. He explained that he hadn’t yet told his parents about his diagnosis, as they were aloof and unaffectionate. Before the office closed for Christmas in 2011, Mallory said that, as his parents had no interest in seeing him, he would instead make an exploratory visit to the facilities of Dignitas, the assisted-death nonprofit based in Switzerland. A Dignitas death occurs in a small house next to a machine-parts factory; there’s no tradition of showing this space to possible future patients. Mallory said that he had found his visit peaceful.

Sources told me that, a few months later, Ursula Mackenzie, then Little, Brown’s C.E.O., attended a dinner where she sat next to the C.E.O. of the publishing house whose job offer had led to Mallory’s promotion. The rival C.E.O. told Mackenzie that there had been no such offer. (Mackenzie declined to comment. The rival C.E.O. did not reply to requests for comment.) When challenged at Little, Brown, Mallory claimed that the rival C.E.O. was lying, in reprisal for Mallory’s having once rejected a sexual proposition.

In August, 2012, Mallory left Little, Brown. The terms of his departure are covered by a nondisclosure agreement. But it’s clear that Little, Brown did not find Mallory’s response about the job offer convincing. “And, once that fell away, then you obviously think, Is he really ill?” the once supportive colleague said. Everything now looked doubtful, “even to the extent of ‘Does his family exist?’ and ‘Is he even called Dan Mallory?’ ”

Mallory was not fired. This fact points to the strength of employee protections in the U.K.—it’s hard to prove the absence of a job offer—but also, perhaps, to a sense of embarrassment and dread. The prospect of Mallory’s public antagonism was evidently alarming: Little, Brown was conscious of the risks of “a fantasist walking around telling lies,” an employee at the company told me. Another source made a joking reference to “The Talented Mr. Ripley”: “He could come at me with an axe. Or an oar.”

In protecting his career, Mallory held the advantage of his own failings: Little, Brown’s reputation would have been harmed by the knowledge that it had hired, and then promoted, a habitual liar. When Mallory left, many of his colleagues were unaware of any unpleasantness. There was even a small, awkward dinner in his honor.

Two weeks before Mallory left Little, Brown, it was announced that he had accepted a job in New York, as an executive editor at William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. Publishing professionals estimate that his starting salary was at least two hundred thousand dollars a year. That fall, he moved into an apartment in a sixty-floor tower, with a pool, in midtown, and into an office at Morrow, on Fifty-third Street.

He had been hired by Liate Stehlik, Morrow’s widely admired publisher. It’s not clear if Stehlik heard rumors about Mallory’s unreliability—or, to use the words of a former Morrow colleague, the fact that “London had ended in some sort of ball of flame.” Stehlik did not reply to requests for comment for this article.

Whereas in London Mallory had sometimes seemed like a British satire of American bluster, in New York he came off as British. He spoke with an English accent and said “brilliant,” “bloody,” and “Where’s the loo?”—as one colleague put it, he was “a grown man walking around with a fake accent that everyone knows is fake.” The habit lasted for years, and one can find a postman, not a mailman, in “The Woman in the Window.”

Some book editors immerse themselves in text; others focus on making deals. Mallory was firmly of the latter type, and specialized in acquiring established authors who had an international reach. Before the end of 2012, he had signed Wilbur Smith—once a giant in popular historical fiction (and now, as Mallory put it in an e-mail to friends, “approximately four centuries old”).

At some point that winter, Mallory stopped coming into the office. This mystified colleagues, who were given no explanation.

On February 12, 2013, some people in London who knew Mallory professionally received a group e-mail from Jake Mallory, Dan’s brother, whom they’d never met. Writing from a Gmail address, Jake said that Dan would be going to the hospital the next day, for the removal of a tumor. He’d be having “complicated surgery with several high risk factors, including the possibility of paralysis and/or the loss of function below the waist.” But, Jake went on, “Dan has been through worse and has pointed out that if he could make it through Love Actually alive, this surgery holds no terrors.” Dan would eat “an early dinner of sashimi and will then read a book about dogs until bedtime,” Jake wrote, adding, “Dan was treated terribly by people throughout his childhood and teenage years and into his twenties, which left him a very deeply lonely person, so he does not like/trust many people. Please keep him in your thoughts.”

That e-mail appears to have been addressed exclusively to contacts in the U.K. The next day, Jake sent an e-mail to acquaintances of Dan’s in the New York publishing world. It noted that Dan would soon be undergoing surgery to address “a tumor in his spine,” adding, “This isn’t the first (or even second) time that Dan has had to undergo this sort of treatment, so he knows the drill, although it’s still an unpleasant and frightening proposition. He says that he is looking forward to being fitted with a spinal-fluid drain and that this will render him half-man, half-machine.”

Recipients wrote back in distress. An editor at a rival publishing house told me, “I totally fell for it. After all, who would fabricate such a story? I sent books and sympathies.” In time, Jake’s exchanges with this editor became “quippy and upbeat.” Another correspondent told Jake that his writing was as droll as Dan’s.

Jake’s styling of “e.mail” was unusual. The next week, Dan wrote to Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent. He began, “Wanted to thank you for your very lovely e.mail to my brother.”

Given the idiosyncrasy of “e.mail”—and given Dan’s taste for crafted zingers, and his history of fabrication—it’s now easy to suppose, as one recipient put it, that “something crazy was going on,” and that “Jake” was Dan. Like Tom Ripley writing letters that were taken as the work of the murdered Dickie Greenleaf, Dan was apparently communicating with friends in a fictional voice. (Online impersonations also figure in the plot of “The Woman in the Window.”)

Jake Mallory is thirty-five. He’s a little shorter than Dan, and doesn’t have the same lacrosse-player combination of strong chin and floppy hair. The week of Dan’s alleged surgery, while Jake was supposedly by his side in New York, Jake’s fiancée posted on Facebook a professional “pre-wedding” photograph of the couple. In it, she and Jake, who got married that summer, look happy and hopeful. Jake Mallory did not respond to requests for comment. Dan Mallory, through the spokesperson, said that he was “not the author of the e-mails” sent by “Jake.”

On February 14, 2013, a “Jake” message to New York contacts described overnight surgery—uncommon timing for a scheduled procedure—in an unspecified hospital. “My brother’s 7-hour surgery ended early this morning,” the e-mail began. “He experienced significant blood loss—more so than is common during spinal surgeries, so it required two transfusions. However, the tumor appears to have been completely removed. His very first words upon waking up were ‘I need vodka.’ ” I was told that a recipient sent vodka to Dan’s apartment, and was thanked by “Jake,” who reported that his brother roused himself just long enough to say that the sender was a goddess.

The ventriloquism is halfhearted. Dan’s own voice keeps intruding, and the hurried sequence of events suggests anxiety about getting the patient home, and returning him to a sparer, mythic narrative of endurance and wit. While in a New York hospital, Dan was a dot on the map, exposed to visitors. Reports from the ward would require the clutter of realist fiction: medical devices, doctors with names.

“Jake” continued, “He has been fitted with a ‘lumbar drain’ in his back to drain his spinal fluid. The pain is apparently quite severe, but he is on medicine.” (A Britishism.) “He is not in great shape but did manage to ask if he could keep the tumor as a pet. He will most likely be going home today.”

On February 15th, “Jake” wrote an e-mail to Parris-Lamb: “We’re anticipating a week or so of concentrated rest, the only trick will be finding enough reading material to keep his brain occupied.” A week later, Dan Mallory, writing from his own e-mail address, sent Parris-Lamb the note thanking him for the “very lovely e.mail”—which, he said, had “warmed my black heart.” Mallory went on, “Today I start weaning myself—I’ll just let that clause stand on its own for a minute; are you gagging yet?—off my sweet sweet Vicodin, so am at last fit to correspond. Feeling quite spry; the wound is healing nicely, and I’m no longer wobbly on my feet. Not when sober, at any rate.”

Mallory suggested meeting the agent for drinks, or dinner, a week or two later. Writing to another contact, he described an impending trip to London, for which he was packing little more than “a motheaten jumper.” On February 26th, twelve days after seven-hour spinal surgery, Mallory wrote to Parris-Lamb to say that he was in Nashville, for work.

Three days later, “Jake” wrote another group e-mail, saying that “an allergic reaction to a new pain killer” had caused Dan “to go into shock and cardiac arrest.” He went on, “He was taken to the hospital on time and treated immediately and is out of intensive care (still on a respirator and under sedation). While this setback is not welcome it is not permanent either, and at least Dan can now say he has had two lucky escapes in the space of two months.” “Jake” went on, “The worst is past and we are hoping he can go back to his apartment this weekend and then pick up where he left off. This would daunt a mere mortal but not my brother.”

At the end of March, late at night, “Jake” wrote again to London contacts. Dan was “in decent physical shape,” but was upset about the “painful upheaval” of the previous year—and about an e-mail, written by an unnamed Little, Brown executive, that seemed to “poke fun at him.” Dan felt “utterly let down” and was “withdrawing into himself like a turtle.”

“Jake” noted that Dan had been “working with abused children and infants at the hospital where he was treated.” The previous week, “Jake” had seen Dan “talking to a little girl whose arm had been broken for her,” he wrote, adding, “My brother’s arm was broken for him when he was a baby.” This phrasing seems to stop just short of alleging parental abuse. (The theme of childhood victimization, sometimes an element of “Jake” e-mails sent to London associates, did not appear in the New York e-mails.) “Jake” went on, “He wrote the little girl a story about a hedgehog in his nicest handwriting to show her how she could rebound from a bad experience. I want for him to do the same, although I understand that he is tired of having to rebound from things.”

The same night the “Jake” e-mail was sent, an ex-colleague of Mallory’s at Little, Brown received an anonymous e-mail calling her one of the “nastiest c*nts in publishing.” Mallory was asked about the e-mail, and was told that Little, Brown would contact law enforcement if anything similar happened again. It didn’t. (Through the spokesperson, Mallory said that he did not write the message and “does not recall being warned” about it.) In “The Woman in the Window,” Anna Fox seeks advice about a threatening anonymous e-mail, and is told that “there’s no way to trace a Gmail account.”

A week later, in an apparent attempt at a reset, Dan Mallory wrote a breezy group e-mail under his own name. The cancer surgery, he said, had been “a total success.” A metal contraption was attached to his spine, so he was now “half-man, half-machine.” He noted that he’d just seen “Matilda” with his parents.

When Mallory returned to work that spring, after several weeks, nothing was said. A former co-worker at Morrow, who admires him and still has only the vaguest sense of a health issue, told me that Mallory “seemed the same as before.” He hadn’t lost any weight or hair.

After his return, Mallory came to work on a highly irregular schedule. Unlike other editors, he rarely attended Wednesday-afternoon editorial meetings. At one point, another co-worker began keeping a log of Mallory’s absences.

Mallory bought a one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea, for six hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. He decorated it with images and models of dogs, a framed sign reading “Amagansett,” and a reproduction of a seventeenth-century engraving of New College, Oxford.

Morrow executives either believed that Mallory’s cancer story was real or decided to live with the fact that it was not. Explaining Morrow’s accommodation of its employee, a former colleague said that Mallory’s focus on international deals protected him, adding, “Nothing’s more important than global authors.” The co-worker went on, “There’s a horror movie where all the teachers in a school have been infected by an alien parasite. The kids realize it, and of course nobody believes them. That’s what it felt like.” The co-worker described Mallory’s “gaslighting, lying, and manipulation” in the workplace as cruel, but noted, “People don’t care, if it’s not sexual harassment.” A Morrow spokesperson released a statement: “We don’t comment on the personal lives of our employees or authors. Professionally, Dan was a highly valued editor, and the publication of ‘The Woman in the Window’—a #1 New York Times bestseller out of the gate, and the bestselling debut novel of 2018—speaks for itself.”

An acquaintance of Mallory’s recently said that “there’s not a lot of confrontation” in publishing. “It’s a business based on hope. You never know what’s going to work.” In the industry, rumors about the “Jake” e-mails were contained—perhaps by discretion or out of people’s embarrassment about having been taken in.

I recently spoke with Victoria Sanders, an agent who represents Karin Slaughter, the thriller writer. In 2015, Slaughter signed a three-book deal, for more than ten million dollars, involving Mallory and a British counterpart. Sanders viewed Mallory as Slaughter’s “quarterback,” adding, “His level of engagement made him really quite extraordinary.”

The editor at a rival publishing house who’d had “quippy” exchanges with the Jake persona said of the episode, “Even now it seems a bizarre, eccentric game, but not threatening.” “Jake” hadn’t asked for cash, so it wasn’t an “injurious scam.” The editor said, “This seemed almost performance art.” Chris Parris-Lamb, however, was affronted, in part because someone close to him had recently died from cancer.

The acquaintance who described an industry “based on hope” didn’t see Mallory for a few years, then made plans to meet him for a work-related drink, in Manhattan. Mallory said that he was now well, except for an eye problem. His eye began to twitch. Mallory’s companion asked after Jake. “Oh, he’s dead,” Mallory said. “Yes, he committed suicide.” The acquaintance recalled to me that, at that moment, “I just knew I was never going to correspond or deal with him again.”

In 2013, Sophie Hannah met Mallory for the first time, over lunch in New York. They discussed plans, already set in motion in London, for Hannah to write the first official Agatha Christie continuation novel. William Morrow would publish it in the U.S. They also discussed Hannah’s non-Christie fiction, which later also came to Morrow. Hannah, who lives in Cambridge, recently said by phone that they quickly became friends. Mallory “renewed my creative energy,” she said. He had a knack for “giving feedback in the form of praise for exactly the things I’m proud of.”

Hannah seems to have found, in Mallory, a remarkable source of material. In 2015, she completed her second Hercule Poirot novel, “Closed Casket.” Poirot is a guest at an Irish country house, and meets Joseph Scotcher, a character whose role can’t be described without spoilers. Scotcher is a charming young flatterer who has told everyone that he is terminally ill, with kidney disease. During Poirot’s visit, Scotcher is murdered, and an autopsy reveals that his kidneys were healthy.

After the murder, Randall Kimpton, an American doctor who is also staying in the house, tells Poirot that he’d become friendly with Scotcher years earlier, at Oxford; he had begun to doubt Scotcher’s dire prognosis, while thinking that “surely no one would tell a lie of such enormity.” Kimpton tells Poirot that he was once approached by someone claiming to be Scotcher’s brother. This brother, who looked identical to Scotcher except for darker skin and a wild beard, had confirmed the kidney disease, and Kimpton had decided “no man of honor would agree to tell a stranger that his brother was dying if it were not so.” But the supposed brother had then accidentally revealed himself to be Scotcher, wearing a beard glued to his face.

A seductive man lies about a fatal disease, then defends the lie by pretending to be his brother. The brother’s name is Blake. When I asked Hannah if the plot was inspired by real events, she was evasive, and more than once she said, “I really like Dan, and he’s only ever been good to me.” She also noted that, before starting to write “Closed Casket,” she described its plot to Mallory: “He said, ‘Yes, that sounds amazing!’ ” Hannah, then, can’t be accused of discourtesy.

But she acknowledged that there were “obvious parallels” between “Closed Casket” and “rumors that circulated” about Mallory. She also admitted that the character of Kimpton, the American doctor, owes something to her former editor. I had noticed that Kimpton speaks with an affected English accent and—in what works as a fine portrait of Mallory, mid-flow—has eyes that “seemed to flare and subside as his lips moved.” The passage continues, “These wide-eyed flares were only seconds apart, and appeared to want to convey enthusiastic emphasis. One was left with the impression that every third or fourth word he uttered was a source of delight to him.” (Chris Parris-Lamb, shown these sentences, said, “My God! That’s so good.”) While Hannah was writing “Closed Casket,” her private working title for the novel was “You’re So Vain, You Probably Think This Poirot’s About You.”

A publishing employee in New York told me that, in 2013, Hannah had become suspicious that Mallory wasn��t telling the truth when he spoke of making a trip to the U.K. for cancer treatment, and had hired a detective to investigate. This suggestion seemed to be supported by an account, on Hannah’s blog, of hiring a private detective that summer. Hannah wrote that she had called him to describe a “weird conundrum.” Later, during a vacation with her husband in Agatha Christie’s country house, in Devon, she called to check on the detective’s progress; he told her that “there was a rumor going round that X is the case.”

“You’re supposed to be finding out if X is true,” Hannah told the detective.

“I’m not sure how we could really do that,” he replied. “Not without hacking e-mail accounts and things like that—and that’s illegal.”

Asked about the blog post, Hannah told me that she had thought of hiring a detective to check on Mallory, and had discussed the idea with friends, but hadn’t followed through. She had, however, hired a detective to investigate a graffiti problem in Cambridge. I said that I found this hard to believe. She went on to say that she had forgotten the detective’s name, she had deleted all her old e-mails, and she didn’t want to bother her husband and ask him to confirm the graffiti story. All this encouraged the thought that the novelist now writing as Agatha Christie had hired a detective to investigate her editor, whom she suspected of lying about a fatal disease.

Hannah—who, according to several people who know her, has a great appetite for discussing Mallory at parties—also seems to have made fictional use of him in her non-Poirot writing. “The Warning,” a short story about psychopathic manipulations, includes an extraordinarily charming man, Tom Rigbey, who loves bull terriers. Hannah recently co-wrote a musical mystery, “The Generalist”; its plot features a successful romance novelist who feels that her publisher has become neglectful, after writing a best-seller of his own.

An American woman in mid-career, a psychologist with a Ph.D. and professional experience of psychopathy, is trapped in her large home by agoraphobia. She has been there for about a year, after a personal trauma. If she tries to go outside, the world spins. She drinks too much, and recklessly combines alcohol and anti-anxiety medication. Police officers distrust her judgment. Online, she plays chess and contributes to a forum for stress-sufferers, a place where danger lies.

This is the setup for “Copycat,” a spirited 1995 thriller, set in San Francisco, starring Sigourney Weaver and Holly Hunter. It also describes “The Woman in the Window.” In “Copycat,” the psychologist’s forum log-in is She Doc. In “Window,” it’s THEDOCTORISIN.

“The Woman in the Window” acknowledges a debt to the film “Rear Window,” by making Anna Fox a fan of noir movies and Hitchcock. And Mallory has publicly referred a few times to “The Girl on the Train,” a well-told story about a boozily unreliable witness, a woman much like Mallory’s boozily unreliable witness. But he hasn’t acknowledged “Copycat”—unless one decides that when, in “The Woman in the Window,” a photograph with a time stamp in its corner downloads from the Internet at a suspenseful, dial-up speed, it is an homage to the same scene in “Copycat,” rather than an indictment of Internet service providers in Manhattan.

When I e-mailed Jon Amiel, the director of “Copycat,” about parallels between the two narratives, he replied, “Wow.” Later, on the phone, he proposed that the debt was probably “not actionable, but certainly worth noting, and one would have hoped that the author might have noted it himself.”

The official origin myth of “The Woman in the Window” feels underwritten. In the summer of 2015, Mallory has said, he was at home for some weeks, adjusting to a new medication. He rewatched “Rear Window,” and noticed a neighbor in the apartment across the street. “How funny,” he said to himself. “Voyeurism dies hard!” A story suggested itself. Mallory is more cogent when reflecting on his shrewdness regarding the marketplace—when he talks about his novel in the voice of a startup C.E.O. pitching for funds. “I bring to ‘The Woman in the Window’ more than thirty years of experience in the genre,” he told a crime-fiction blogger last winter. He explained to a podcast host that, before “Gone Girl,” there had been “no branding” for psychological suspense; afterward, there was vast commercial opportunity. Mallory has said that he favored the pseudonym A. J. Finn in part for its legibility on a small screen, “at reduced pixelation.” He came up with the name Anna Fox after looking for something that was easy to pronounce in many languages.

Mallory has described writing a seventy-five-hundred-word outline and showing it to Jennifer Joel, a literary agent at I.C.M., who is a friend of his; she encouraged him to continue. He has said that he then worked for a year, sustained by Adderall, Coca-Cola, and electronic music. Mallory told the Times that he wrote at night and on the weekends. Former colleagues who had taken note of his office absences were skeptical of this claim.

Paula Hawkins’s “The Girl on the Train” was published in January, 2015. By the summer of 2016, it had sold 4.25 million copies in the U.S. Early that September, just before the release of the film adaptation, it was No. 1 on the Times paperback best-seller list. On September 22nd and 23rd, a PDF of “The Woman in the Window,” by A. J. Finn, was e-mailed to editors in New York and London. Mallory has said that he adopted a pseudonym because he wanted publishers to assess the manuscript without “taking into account my standing in the industry.” This isn’t true, as Mallory has himself acknowledged in some interviews: Jennifer Joel told editors that the author worked at a senior level in publishing.

The editors started reading: “Her husband’s almost home. He’ll catch her this time. There isn’t a scrap of curtain, not a blade of blind, in number 212—the rust-red townhome that once housed the newlywed Motts, until recently, until they un-wed.”

The story feels transposed to New York from a more tranquil place, like North Oxford. The nights are dark; the sound of a cello, or a scream, carries. At the center of the plot are two neighboring houses, on the same side of a street, with side windows that face each other across a garden. This arrangement is easy to find in most parts of the world that aren’t Manhattan.

Mallory cannily set himself the task of popularizing the already wildly popular plot of “The Girl on the Train.” His book consists of a hundred very short chapters, and reads like a film script that has been novelized, on a deadline, under severe vocabulary restrictions: sunshine “bolts in” through a door; eyebrows “bolt into each other”; eyes “bolt open”; one character is “bolted to the sofa”; another has “strong teeth bolting from strong gums.” He then gilded his text with references to Tennyson, Nabokov, and the Pitt Rivers Museum, in Oxford. The over-all effect is a little like reading the e-mails sent by “Jake”: Anna, the narrator, feels subordinate to Mallory’s struttingly insistent voice. It’s much more a Tom Ripley novel than a Patricia Highsmith novel. Instead of Highsmith’s disorienting, erotic discovery of character, “Window” is an enactment of Ripleyan manipulation. It’s a thriller excited about getting away with writing a thriller. In a recent e-mail, Joan Schenkar, the author of “The Talented Miss Highsmith,” an acclaimed biography, described “Window” as a “novel of strategies, not psychologies.” It was, she said, “the most self-conscious thriller I’ve ever opened.”

The selling of “The Woman in the Window” was a perfectly calibrated maneuver, and caused the kind of hoopla that happens only once or twice a year in American publishing. One publisher offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to preëmpt an auction. This was rejected, and at least eight publishing imprints, including Morrow, began to bid for the North American rights. Meanwhile, offers were being made for European editions, and Fox 2000 bought the film rights.

When the bidding reached seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, Mallory revealed his name. A former Morrow employee recalled, “I’d wondered why this person in publishing wants to be anonymous. Then: Oh, that’s why!” Mallory has said that “nobody dropped out” at that point; but many, including Little, Brown, did. When it was announced that Mallory’s employer had won the auction, one joke in New York was “The call was coming from inside the house!”

Morrow sent out a press release saying that Mallory had been “profiled in USA Today”—he hadn’t—and quoting Jennifer Brehl, the Morrow editor who had won the auction. “A. J. Finn’s voice and story were like nothing I’d ever heard before,” she said. “So creepy, sad, twisty-turny, and cunning.” She said that she had not recognized this voice as Mallory’s, and added, “He’s already known as an esteemed editor; I predict a long career as a brilliant novelist, too.” Liate Stehlik, the Morrow publisher, later wrote to booksellers, “I love it, and the only thing I thought when I was reading it was that Morrow must publish this book.”

Mallory stayed on as an editor at Morrow for another year. He set up a corporation, A. J. Finn, Inc., using an Amagansett P.O. box. A photograph of him smiling and unshaven, taken by Hope Brooks, the older of his sisters, began appearing in stories about his success.

The Mallory house in Amagansett is set back from a quiet road; trees line the driveway, joining overhead to form a tunnel. On an overcast morning just before Thanksgiving, I walked up to the house, and reached a garage whose doors were open. An S.U.V. was parked in front; two dogs leaped, barking, from its back seat. (I recalled that, according to Dan Mallory, his mother had, on separate occasions, killed two dogs by backing up over them.)

John Mallory, Dan’s father, came out of the garage, wearing a denim shirt. He is in his mid-sixties, and has a handsome, squarish face. He apologized for the pandemonium, and joked, “I’m just the lawn guy.”

I explained why I was there. “Dan does not want me commenting,” he said. “He’s my son, so I have to respect his privacy.” But his manner was friendly, and the dogs calmed down, and we stood talking for a few minutes. “He’s a wonderful young man, he truly is,” John said.

I said that I’d become interested in Dan’s accounts of cancer—the claim that he’d had a malignant tumor, and that his mother had died of cancer.

“No, no,” he said. He didn’t sound surprised or annoyed—rather, he was obliged to correct a misapprehension. When Dan was a teen-ager, he said, “his mother did have cancer. Stage V, so she was next to death. But, no, Dan didn’t have it. He’s just been an absolutely perfect son. He has his faults, like we all do, he’s just a tremendous young man.”

Did Dan have cancer later? “No, no,” John said, adding that Dan had told him that “he’d been misquoted several times, and it really bothers him when things come out that are negative about him.”

I began to describe the “Jake” e-mails. “Dan and his brother, Jake, are very close,” John said, adding that “Jake would never, ever say” Dan had fallen ill with cancer, because it wasn’t true. I wondered if John had been told that such e-mails existed, and could be explained as the work of a scurrilous third party. They can’t—Dan saw replies written to the “Jake” e-mail address, and responded to them.

When Dan wrote about living in a single-parent family when he was seventeen, was that true?

“No,” John said. “Well, in a way I guess it was, because my wife and I were separated.” They were apart for two and a half years, he said. “She made me come back,” he went on, laughing. “We had our differences. We didn’t file for divorce or anything like that.” He added, “Pam was saying, ‘I think you made a mistake. But it’s up to you.’ And then I realized I’m being an idiot.”

I asked if the separation was difficult for Dan. “Very difficult,” he said. “The family’s very closely knit and to see the dad not there on Thanksgiving or Christmas—Ian, it’s my fault. I hate to this day to think they had a Thanksgiving dinner without me.”

He continued, “Dan went through a tough time, in his teen-age years, but he’s really pulled together.” In the past, “a lot of times, he hid from us.” Now “every morning I get a FaceTime from Dan. He just bought a little French bulldog. Oh, my God, Ian—he bought one three weeks ago, the dog has, like, four thousand toys, a little blanket. He’s just an avid dog-lover, as we all are—as you see. He doesn’t have a mean bone in his body.” He said that, as far as he knew, Dan had finished his Ph.D.

The dogs started barking again. A car came up the driveway. “Here comes his mother,” John said. “Oh, Lord.”

Pamela Mallory got out of an S.U.V. with a shopping bag. I introduced myself. “We’re not doing that,” she said, walking toward the house. “Thank you.”

In “The Woman in the Window,” much of whose plot this article is about to give away, Anna Fox watches a family move in next door. Ethan, the family’s sorrowful and lonely only child, aged about fifteen, visits Anna. She is filled with pity when he describes a controlling, violent father, and she is struck by his earnestness: he’s prone to tears, and teaches swimming to developmentally disabled children.

Then Ethan murders his mother, and—in the novel’s climax—appears one night in Anna’s bedroom, with a letter opener as a weapon, and a crazed look, saying, “Older women interest me.” In passages that seem more fluent than those which have come before, Ethan acknowledges the matricide, and describes it as “exhilarating.” Sitting on Anna’s bed, playing with the letter opener, he acknowledges other transgressions. By impersonating a friendly grandmother on Anna’s agoraphobia forum, he has tricked her into giving up her passwords. He has copied her house key, allowing him to go in and out of her house. “I come here almost every night,” he says. He forces her to agree that she is “very fucking stupid.” He mocks her—a child psychologist—for not recognizing him for what he is.

“I know what I am,” Ethan tells her. “Does that help?”

Anna says to herself, “Psychopath. The superficial charm, the labile personality, the flat affect.” She then tells him, “You enjoy manipulating others.”

He replies, “It’s fun. And easy. You’re really easy.” He strokes the blade against his thigh. “I didn’t want you to think I was a threat. That’s why I said I missed my friends. And I pretended I might be gay. And I cried all those fucking times.”

Both Ethan’s depression and his account of a vicious father were part of a performance—one effective enough to dupe a psychologist and draw the eye away from personality pathology.

In a Morrow sales brochure, Mallory said that he’d “struggled for more than fifteen years with severe depression,” and that, in 2015, he had finally been given a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder. This announcement surprised the acquaintances of Mallory’s who spoke to me. Over the years, he had been willing to talk of cancer, near-death, and a brother’s suicide, but he hadn’t mentioned mental illness so severe that he’d sought relief in electric shocks and ketamine.

Speaking in Colorado last January, Mallory quoted a passage from Kay Redfield Jamison’s memoir, “An Unquiet Mind,” in which she describes repeatedly confronting the social wreckage caused by her bipolar episodes—knowing that she had “apologies to make.” Nobody I spoke to remembered a Mallory reckoning or an apology. In more recent public appearances, Mallory seems to have dropped this reference to wreckage. Instead, he has accepted credit for his courage in bringing up his mental suffering, and he has foregrounded his virtues. Asked, on an Australian podcast, to define himself in three adjectives, Mallory said, “Inquisitive. Kind—I do think I’m a kind person.” He clicked his tongue. “And I love French bulldogs. I don’t know if there’s an adjective that sums that up.”

Mallory clearly has experienced mental distress. At Mallory’s request, his psychiatrist confirmed to me that Mallory was given a diagnosis of bipolar II. The psychiatrist said that Mallory, because of his mother’s illness, sometimes had “somatic complaints, fears, and preoccupations,” including about cancer. But a bipolar II diagnosis does not easily explain organized untruths, maintained over time. Nigel Blackwood, a forensic psychiatrist at King’s College London, told me that patients with the condition may experience “periods of inflated self-esteem,” but he emphasized that hypomanic episodes “cannot account for sustained arrogant and deceptive interpersonal behaviors.”

Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent, who has a very close family member who is bipolar, said, “I’ve seen the ravages, the suffering that the disease can cause.” He went on, “If Mallory’s deceit is the product of bipolar episodes, then they have been singularly advantageous to his career, and that is unlike any bipolar person I’ve ever encountered. And if he is one of the lucky ones who has managed to get his disease under control and produce a best-selling novel—if he is stable and lucid enough to do that—then he is stable and lucid enough to apologize to the people he lied to and the people he hurt.”

Carrie Bearden, a professor of psychiatry at U.C.L.A., who has not met Mallory, said that a patient with bipolar II disorder cannot attribute to that diagnosis delusions, amnesia, or “chronic lying for secondary gain, or to get attention.” To do so is “very irresponsible,” she said, and could add to the “already huge stigma associated with these disorders.”

On January 30th, a public-relations firm working on Mallory’s behalf provided The New Yorker with a statement from him: “For the past two years, I’ve spoken publicly about mental illness: the defining experience of my life—particularly during the brutal years bookending my late twenties and mid-thirties—and the central theme of my novel. Throughout those dark times, and like many afflicted with severe bipolar II disorder, I experienced 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, or believe—things of which, in many instances, I have absolutely no recollection.”

He went on, “It is the case that on numerous occasions in the past, I have stated, implied, or allowed others to believe that I was afflicted with a physical malady instead of a psychological one: cancer, specifically. My mother battled aggressive breast cancer starting when I was a teenager; it was the formative experience of my adolescent life, synonymous with pain and panic. I felt intensely ashamed of my psychological struggles—they were my scariest, most sensitive secret. And for fifteen years, even as I worked with psychotherapists, I was utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew—that they’d conclude I was defective in a way that I should be able to correct, or, worse still, that they wouldn’t believe me. Dissembling seemed the easier path.”

He continued, “With the benefit of hindsight, I’m sorry to have taken, or be seen to have taken, advantage of anyone else’s goodwill, however desperate the circumstances; that was never the goal.”

A paperback edition of “The Woman in the Window” was published in the U.K. in December, and the novel immediately returned to the best-seller list; the U.S. paperback will appear next month, with a first print run of three hundred and fifty-five thousand copies. The movie adaptation, written by the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, is scheduled to be released on October 4th.

Mallory has said that his second novel will be set in San Francisco. It will have the flavor of an Agatha Christie story, and will be partly set in a Victorian mansion. It’s a story of revenge, he has said, involving a female thriller writer and an interviewer who learns of a dark past. He hopes to turn it into a television series.

#dan mallory #a.j. finn #books #publishing #scam #hoax

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kamreadsandrecs · 8 months

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So for anyone wondering why he's considered controversial: this New Yorker story has the whole story - and boy is it a DOOZY! Looks like either Dan Mallory/A.J. Finn and/or his publishing house were counting on the internet's short memory span to squeeze this new book out in the hopes that no one would remember what happened six years ago and buy it.

Such storytelling is hardly scandalous. Mallory was taking his first steps as a public figure. Most people have jazzed up an anecdote, and it is a novelist’s job to manipulate an audience.

“Wow!” Dolan said.

Mallory said, “So perhaps that contributed to my fascination with agoraphobia.”

Dolan asked, “You had the discipline to, say, not kick the door down?”

At some point that winter, Mallory stopped coming into the office. This mystified colleagues, who were given no explanation.

Jake’s styling of “e.mail” was unusual. The next week, Dan wrote to Chris Parris-Lamb, the agent. He began, “Wanted to thank you for your very lovely e.mail to my brother.”

A publishing employee in New York told me that, in 2013, Hannah had become suspicious that Mallory wasn’t telling the truth when he spoke of making a trip to the U.K. for cancer treatment, and had hired a detective to investigate. This suggestion seemed to be supported by an account, on Hannah’s blog, of hiring a private detective that summer. Hannah wrote that she had called him to describe a “weird conundrum.” Later, during a vacation with her husband in Agatha Christie’s country house, in Devon, she called to check on the detective’s progress; he told her that “there was a rumor going round that X is the case.”

“You’re supposed to be finding out if X is true,” Hannah told the detective.

“I’m not sure how we could really do that,” he replied. “Not without hacking e-mail accounts and things like that—and that’s illegal.”

The selling of “The Woman in the Window” was a perfectly calibrated maneuver, and caused the kind of hoopla that happens only once or twice a year in American publishing. One publisher offered hundreds of thousands of dollars in an effort to pre��mpt an auction. This was rejected, and at least eight publishing imprints, including Morrow, began to bid for the North American rights. Meanwhile, offers were being made for European editions, and Fox 2000 bought the film rights.

I said that I’d become interested in Dan’s accounts of cancer—the claim that he’d had a malignant tumor, and that his mother had died of cancer.

When Dan wrote about living in a single-parent family when he was seventeen, was that true?

The dogs started barking again. A car came up the driveway. “Here comes his mother,” John said. “Oh, Lord.”

Pamela Mallory got out of an S.U.V. with a shopping bag. I introduced myself. “We’re not doing that,” she said, walking toward the house. “Thank you.”

“I know what I am,” Ethan tells her. “Does that help?”

Anna says to herself, “Psychopath. The superficial charm, the labile personality, the flat affect.” She then tells him, “You enjoy manipulating others.”

Both Ethan’s depression and his account of a vicious father were part of a performance—one effective enough to dupe a psychologist and draw the eye away from personality pathology.

#dan mallory #a.j. finn #publishing #books #scam #hoax #full article text under the cut because fuck paywalls

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woodstockbtswriter · 4 years

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Voyagers

Genre: Fluff/Headcanon

Pairing: Yoongi x Reader (Female)

Summary: A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join BTS on a Bon Voyage adventure leads to once-in-a-lifetime love.

Warning(s): Some mentions of physical intimacy, but nothing detailed or graphic.

Author’s Note: So... this is it. This is the end. And as promised, it is looooong. You might want to find some snacks and a comfy spot before we get started. I probably could have broken this up into 3 or 4 more parts but, here it is. Please note, my SMAU Sentimental and my drabble Love both fit into this part, and I’ve added links where they should be read.

I can’t believe how far we’ve come! This story is my baby, and I’m so immensely grateful for all the love and support it has received! As relieved as I am to finish it, it is hard to let go, so it’s entirely possible that I may write some bonus chapters in the future. Although, I tried to fit so much into this epilogue, I’m not sure what’s left to say! So anyway, for the last time, please, PLEASE enjoy! 💕

GIF Credit: MONOSUGA

Masterlist

Epilogue

Leaving New Zealand

Yoongi promised he’d take care of everything, and he meant it

You learned that maybe an hour after he snuck out of your room, when one of the producers stopped you as you were lugging your suitcase down the hall

You recognized him as the same producer who’d requested you spend less time with Yoongi, and you worried you were in trouble

But to your astonishment, he apologized for suggesting anything, saying it was never his intention to make things difficult for you and he meant no disrespect

He then informed you that he personally made all the arrangements for you to fly to Korea with the boys instead of returning home

And as he bowed and wished you all the best, you realized Yoongi must have spoken with him

You were touched that he kept his word, and made sure to thank him as soon as you found him out in the main area of the house

All the members and the crew were bustling about the living room and kitchen, hurrying to pack up and clear out

But you dared to give Yoongi a quick, grateful hug, and a blush spread across his cheeks

Hoseok noticed and froze in his tracks, shooting you a look

So you guessed it was as good a time as any to let the other boys know you’d be joining them on their flight home

(Though you’d have to wait until you were all alone to tell them exactly why)

They were all happy and excited, but none more than Hoseok

He scooped you up in his arms and twirled you around, squealing

And when he set you back down, he whispered in your ear that he wanted to hear all the details later

With a laugh, you promised to tell him everything as soon as you got the chance

Not much later, everyone was all loaded up, and you made your way to the airport

Leaving New Zealand was bittersweet

Your week there with the boys had been one of the best of your life

But you were excited to have another whole week with Yoongi

And you were particularly looking forward to more privacy

Though you knew it wouldn’t be much more

The Bangtan boys were constantly in the public eye

And that meant that - even though filming for Bon Voyage was over - you and Yoongi still had to maintain some distance when you weren’t alone

That much was apparent the moment you arrived at the airport in Christchurch

Yoongi had held your hand the whole drive, but released it before exiting the vehicle and didn’t take it again

But you still sat next to each other on the plane, and enjoyed talking and watching movies together during the long flight

And everything about it just felt so comfortable and normal and… right

That is, until you ultimately arrived at the Incheon airport, and the reality of dating an idol became even clearer

Dozens of paparazzi and fans were gathered, obviously aware that BTS was due to return that day

The crowd fluttered to life as soon as your group came around the corner, cameras flashing and girls calling out

And when they caught sight of you with the members, they became even more frantic

But Yoongi subtly kept you close behind him, shielding you from the mob as best he could

And the other boys formed a circle around you until you made it out of the airport and into a waiting car

Then when you were safely behind tinted windows, Yoongi finally took your hand again

And he expressed his regret that you had to endure that scene, seeming worried that you’d have second thoughts

But you reassured him that you could handle the craziness, and promised him that he was worth it to you

He was visibly relieved when you said that

With a smile and a squeeze of your hand, he assured you he would look out for you

And promised that you were worth it to him, too

First Night in Seoul

When you arrived at their luxury apartment in the heart of Seoul, Yoongi and the boys gave you the grand tour first thing

It was a little surreal to actually be there when you’d only ever seen it in videos

But you noticed how much more relaxed the boys seemed the moment they walked in the door, and could tell how happy they were to be home

And you felt instantly at home, too

Which was a good thing, because Yoongi informed you that you would be staying at their apartment with them all week

You would have been more than happy with a hotel room, you told him, your mouth hanging open

You would have even taken a bunk in a hostel, as long as you were close to him

But Yoongi insisted, saying you could stay in his room, and he’d sleep on the couch

Or you could share his bed, he mumbled so only you could hear, if that was what you were most comfortable with

With a suppressed smile, you told him you’d think about it, and you resumed your tour of the apartment feeling unreasonably flushed

After you’d seen the whole apartment, the boys ordered dinner (Jimin’s treat, of course)

And as everyone tucked in, Namjoon raised his glass

He proposed a celebratory toast, to a successful Bon Voyage, to returning home, to you - their new friend

And to Yoongi-hyung falling in love

The other members cheered enthusiastically in agreement, tapping their glasses together

Which caused you to grin, and Yoongi to groan

Namjoon, Hoseok, Taehyung, and Jungkook wasted no time recounting their version of events, filling Jin and Jimin in on anything they might have missed

And you happily supplied any further details they lacked, like the fact that you and Yoongi were now officially together

All the boys teased Yoongi mercilessly for being so soft

And Yoongi was a grumbling, blushing mess all the while

But you could feel the love behind their mocking

And they made sure you knew - despite their joking - how truly happy they all were for both of you

By the time dinner was over, everyone was exhausted and ready to call it a night

You hadn’t given a lot of thought to the sleeping arrangements since Yoongi first mentioned them

But as he made up his bed for you with clean sheets and extra pillows, you knew you didn’t want to sleep in his room without him

And when you asked him to stay, Yoongi needed no convincing

He quickly slipped beneath the covers with you, hugging you tightly against his body and pressing kisses to the back of your neck and into your hair

And that was how you spent the whole night, curled up together, sleeping blissfully

And though you’d be lying if you said the idea of doing something other than sleeping never crossed your mind…

Just being able to spend the night together without any fear of being caught in the morning was enough

For the time being, anway

Boyfriend/Girlfriend

Your extra week with Yoongi in Korea, like your week in New Zealand, was one you’d never forget

The boys had full schedules, consisting of everything from rehearsals to filming to recording to appearances, but Yoongi continued to keep his promise

He arranged for you to accompany them to everything, so you were able to spend a lot of time all together

And you naturally continued to grow closer and closer to all of the boys

Especially Hoseok

He remained your biggest ally and most trusted confidant, and you quickly became best friends

Those hours of downtime in dressing rooms were some of the most fun of your week

They were also some of the longest, as you spent many of them waiting on the boys to fulfil their responsibilities

But their staff members were very accommodating - having been instructed to respect and protect you - and you even made friends with a few of the the stylists

When the guys didn’t have obligations, Yoongi spent every waking (and non-waking) moment with you

On the second day of your stay, Yoongi gave you a private tour of Genius Lab

At first, he seemed shy and self-conscious about showing you such an important part of his life

But when he sat in front of his computer, Yoongi casually pulled you down to sit with him, reaching his arms around you and resting his chin on your shoulder as he played you a couple of beats

And next thing you knew you were turned around on his lap, exchanging heated kisses as Yoongi leaned back in his office chair

Eventually, you forced yourselves to leave the studio

But not before Yoongi gave you the passcode, and told you to feel free to use it anytime

Which you did, every chance you got

You loved to see him in his element, and were content to just sit and listen to him work for hours

You’d thumb through his Ikea catalogs while you listened, nodding along to his beats

And you often brought him coffee or lunch, to keep his energy up

On the third day, you found time to play some one-on-one basketball

Which Yoongi let you win

And you let him think he let you win

You also cooked dinner together a few nights

Stole a nap together more than once

Binge-watched The Lord of the Rings together

And spent every night secure in each other’s arms

Yoongi may have been worried he couldn’t be the kind of boyfriend you wanted

But he was

He absolutely was

Completely unlike his cold, unfeeling, disinterested, tough-guy persona, he was nothing but soft and caring with you

Just as you’d always known he would be

And the first time he referred to you as his girlfriend - on the fourth day, when he told Jin to stop bothering you with his dad jokes - it made your heart skip a beat

You still had to be mindful in public and around cameras, but it wasn’t as bad as you thought, and it got easier every day

In fact, Yoongi found it remarkable how well - and how quickly - you were able to adapt to his chaotic life

Last Night in Seoul

Before you knew it, it was your final night in Korea

As you as laid together in Yoongi’s bed - after having shared your last meal with all the members - your head and heart were both fit to burst

You couldn’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to Yoongi in the morning

Especially without telling him you loved him

And when Yoongi kissed you slowly and deeply...

After his eyes caressed your face as he told you how breathtakingly beautiful you are…

You were overcome by the desire to show him - physically - how much you loved him

Your hands fumbled to grasp his shirt, and pull it up over his head

But Yoongi stopped you as soon as he realized your intent

“Not like this,” He said

Not rushed

Not urgent

Not desperate

As much as he wanted you - and he wanted you very much - he didn’t want to take this step just because you were leaving the next day and felt like you were out of time

He wanted to wait until the moment was right

When he could take his time with you, and treat you the way you deserved to be treated

You couldn’t help but be disappointed by his response

But deep down you appreciated how much he respected you, and you knew he was right

So you only stayed up talking that night

And as hard as it was, you refrained from ever blurting out, “I love you”

Because you wanted to wait for the right moment, too

“Home” At Last

Leaving Korea the next morning was one of the hardest things you ever had to do

But you managed to save your tears until after you hugged all the boys, kissed Yoongi, and climbed into the car that would take you to the airport

Before you left, Yoongi bought a return ticket for you to visit again the next month

And you promised each other to keep in constant contact until then

But as the driver pulled away from the boys’ apartment complex and you waved to each other until you were out of sight…

You felt like you were leaving half of yourself behind

Sentimental

When you were finally home, it seemed as though you had been gone much longer than 2 weeks

And, if you were honest, it didn’t really feel like home anymore

You tried to return to your normal routine, to immerse yourself in your work that you loved

But now that you knew what it was like to have Yoongi in your life, normal life felt…

Empty without him

You kept in touch and communicated through texts and calls everyday

Any spare minute Yoongi could find in his hectic schedule, he would video chat with you

He always made time for you, and always made an effort to be open and vulnerable with you

And though he rarely said it in so many words, you could tell he missed you just as much as you missed him

Hearing Yoongi’s deep voice and seeing his handsome face always put you at ease

But no call was ever long enough

And after one particularly brief conversation, you idly began researching how to apply for a visa

You also hated not saying “I love you” every time you said goodbye

But you didn’t want the first time you told Yoongi to be over the phone

So you made up your mind that the next time you saw him, you would tell him no matter what

Firsts

Finally, after what felt like a never-ending month, you found yourself back in Yoongi’s studio

And in his arms - where you’d been longing to be - as he played a new song for you

It was softer and more melodic than his usual style

He sang along to the music, his voice smooth and low, and you quickly realized…

It was a love song

And when the last notes faded out, he admitted that he wrote it for you

With tears brimming in your eyes, you couldn’t contain yourself any longer

Your words spilling out of you, you told Yoongi you loved the song

And you loved him

So, so much

Yoongi wiped your tears with a soft smirk

That’s what he was going to say

You stole the words right out of his mouth, he teased you

You chuckled, apologizing, but Yoongi shook his head

And as he kissed you tenderly, he said he loved you

So, so much

He’d been falling for you all along, he told you, but when you left last month…

He immediately noticed how empty his studio, his bed, his life, and his heart, felt without you

And that was when he realized he was completely in love with you

It was impossible to describe how you felt hearing Yoongi speak those 3 little words

Finally being able to say those 3 little words to him felt almost as good

And you looked forward to saying - and hearing - them often from then on out

For the rest of the day, Yoongi could hardly keep his hands off of you

And later that night, he did more than say “I love you”

Though he did say it, over and over

But he also showed you how much he loved you

Physically, for the first time

And contrary to most fanfiction you’d come across, Yoongi was not rough

In reality, he was gentle and sweet and soft and caring and loving and patient and giving and...

Perfect

Everything about that night was perfect

And more than worth the wait

Yoongi marveled at and worshiped every inch of you

He made you feel so loved

And beautiful

And good

More than once

You didn’t take a single moment of the experience for granted

You were mindful to appreciate every detail, to admire everything about Yoongi

And you made sure he felt just as loved - and as good - as you did

That visit was a turning point for your relationship

Yoongi had made it clear - in more ways than one - that any fear he may have felt about falling in love was long gone

And when you returned home, your mind was made up

So you secretly began applying for a work visa in earnest

Because seeing the man you loved so infrequently was only getting harder and harder to bear

Bon Voyage On Air

The next time you visited Yoongi was another month later

And your season of Bon Voyage premiered that same week

So with plenty of snacks and drinks, you gathered in the dorm living room with all the boys and watched the first episode together

Seeing the footage of your incredible journey brought back so many feelings and memories, and it was so fun to reminisce with everyone

But you noticed the editors made suggestive comments every time you and Yoongi were on screen together

Nothing obvious, just subtle little remarks about how cute you were around each other and how fond you seemed to be of one another

You hoped it wouldn’t be enough to make viewers suspect anything about the true nature of your relationship

But the other members noticed, and it was enough for them to tease you and Yoongi

A few weeks later, after several episodes of Bon Voyage had aired, it came to your attention that ARMY had picked up on the chemistry between you and Yoongi

Speculation as to whether you were dating was all over the internet

A lot of fans eagerly shipped you together

As Yoongi had predicted, they found you very likeable, and it was easy to see how well you got along

But there were also plenty of “fans” who had some not very nice things to say about you

Yoongi comforted you when you saw some of the negative comments, and begged you to not worry about any of it

He assured you that things would blow over

And if they didn’t…

Well, you’d deal with that when the time came

The Holiday Season

The next month, BTS had several appearances scheduled in the U.S., so Yoongi arranged for you to meet up with them

One event was a Christmas concert, and you agreed to exchange gifts afterwards because you wouldn't be able to be together Christmas day

You gave Yoongi an authentic chef’s coat with his name embroidered, and a certificate for a couples cooking class

Both of which he moaned and grumbled about

But you knew by the way his eyes twinkled that he was touched, and that he secretly loved his gift

Yoongi gave you a gorgeous, one-of-a-kind light fixture he’d commissioned from a local artist in Seoul

And when you opened the box, you found yourself doing something you never imagined you would do:

Crying over a lamp

Yoongi looked scared when he saw the tears running down your cheeks

But when you managed to articulate that they were happy tears and you loved your present, he grinned and you pulled him into a crushing hug

The week between Christmas and New Year’s, you received word that your work visa had finally been approved

BTS was going to perform in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, so you planned tell Yoongi the good news then

You had to wait behind the scenes while he and the boys were onstage during the countdown

But Yoongi kissed you the moment they returned to the dressing room

And when you told him that you were moving to Korea, he was so stunned he didn’t know what to say

The other members reacted so enthusiastically to your announcement - jumping, dancing, and shouting - that you wouldn’t have heard Yoongi speak anyway

But you could see the tears gathering in his eyes, and they - along with his gummy smile - told you everything he couldn’t say

Moving to South Korea

Over the next month, you happily packed up your entire life and moved to Seoul

Though you didn’t have an apartment lined up yet, you did manage to find an amazing job opportunity with a local interior design company

But all of the guys urged you to not to wait any longer, because they’d be releasing their new album soon and would be busier than ever

They were only too happy to let you stay with them until you found your own place

You didn’t want to take advantage of their hospitality but, once again, Yoongi promised he’d take care of everything

It was only when you were standing inside an empty but beautiful, luxury apartment in an upscale neighborhood not far from the dorms, that you realized how he intended to keep his promise

Yoongi explained that even though all 7 boys chose to still live together, several of them actually owned their own homes

They kept them mostly as investments, but they occasionally came in handy

Like now, when you needed a place to live

The apartment you were in was Yoongi’s private suite

And he wanted you to have it

You tried to decline, saying he was being way too generous and you couldn’t accept

But he insisted

He wanted you close by, he wanted you to be somewhere safe

And he liked the idea of sharing his home with you

But if it would make you feel better, he smirked, he could always charge you rent

You were still hesitant

But then he showed you around the place, pointing out his favorite architectural details, telling you about his plans for its design, and asking you for your professional opinion...

And he was just so cute and eager you couldn’t refuse

So you moved in right away, and you and Yoongi thoroughly enjoyed working together to pick all the paint colors, the furniture, the decorations, and - especially - the light fixtures

As always, you were a great team

Your Christmas present was the perfect final, finishing touch to your new home

And though Yoongi maintained his main residence with the other members…

He probably spent more time at your place than at the dorms

Isolated Together

The next few months were hectic, for you and the boys

You were adjusting to living and working in a new city, and they were gone a lot to promote their new album (which you loved)

But you were so proud of them, and remained their biggest fan, always cheering them on and supporting them

And Yoongi never failed to make time for you

Whether it was by sharing a cup of coffee, a meal, or the couch while you watched a show

Yoongi always took the time to remind you how much he loved you

So you never once regretted your decision to move to Korea

Then a global pandemic turned life upside down

All the members were deeply disappointed when they had to cancel their world tour, and you were heartbroken for them

You knew better than most how hard they’d been preparing for it

But they stayed positive, and took advantage of the unexpected extra time, relaxing and trying new hobbies while in isolation

You were able to work remotely during that time, and stayed at the dorms with Yoongi and the boys

And you cherished the opportunity to be together even more often

You spent a lot of time in Yoongi’s studio as he put the finishing touches on his mixtape

But you also enjoyed several leisure activities together

Like painting

And playing video games (You dominated Mario Kart, but he was the surprising champion of Just Dance)

You even convinced Yoongi to sew a few throw pillows with you for your couch

Then as the release date for Yoongi’s mixtape approached, you accompanied him to the set of the music video for his first single

And your jaw dropped when you saw him in his costume

He looked amazing

Amazingly hot

Because he’d dyed his hair black a few days prior and you missed his light-colored locks, seeing Yoongi in a long blonde wig was particularly…

Exciting

And you may have bribed the costume department to let him keep the outfit

Your relationship progressed a lot in those months, and you grew to understand and respect each other on a deeper level

Though some couples naturally got on each other’s nerves the more time they spent together, the opposite was true for you and Yoongi

Sure, you disagreed occasionally, but you never fought

Yoongi was infinitely patient with you, and often told you that you had calming effect on him

Your personalities were just so compatible, and things only got easier and better the longer you were together

And as it became increasingly apparent how well both of you - together, as a couple - worked…

It became harder and harder to imagine your lives without one another

The Secret’s Out

After Yoongi’s mixtape was released and saw much success, you were ridiculously proud of him

You blasted his songs every chance you got, and constantly showered him with praise

But with so much media attention focused on Yoongi, ARMY once again started getting suspicious about your relationship

Rumors about you moving to Korea had been circulating for a while

And despite taking extra care to stay off camera whenever one of the boys went live, it somehow got out that you were in quarantine with them

What’s more, it wasn’t hard for ARMY to notice how happy Yoongi had been

Eventually, it got to the point where management felt like they needed to be involved

The higher ups at Big Hit wanted to deny everything, and were sure they could convince the public that you were just a friend - to all the members

But after some long talks and careful consideration, you and Yoongi decided that you didn’t want to deny or hide anything anymore

You knew how you felt about each other, and you knew it wasn’t going to change

You were in each other’s lives for good

So the company released a statement confirming your relationship, saying you’d been together since Bon Voyage wrapped

And the internet exploded

A K-Pop idol publicly dating someone was highly unprecedented

But to your relief, the majority of ARMYs were supportive

And they advocated that if Yoongi was happy, everyone should be happy for him

Of course there were still others who felt you didn’t deserve him, or that Yoongi should leave the group

But together you were able to disregard any hate, and just enjoy being with each other openly

A little while later, after the initial shock of your relationship announcement had worn off, the Bon Voyage producers contacted you

Due to the ongoing pandemic, they’d made some adjustments to the show’s format

They’d decided to film in an isolated location in Korea instead of traveling outside the country, and they changed the name to In the Soop

And since you and Yoongi were public now, and because your inclusion in the previous season had been such a success…

They invited you to join BTS for another adventure

Love

Taglist: @bucky-thorin-winchester @yvemoon @serpentiinequeen @neilpoetssociety @narcissism-iskey @kaitswrld

#bts #bts fanfiction #min yoongi #suganetwork #hyunglinenetwork #bts bon voyage #bts headcanons #yoongi x reader #bts imagines #bts fanfic #bts scenarios #bts suga #bts fluff #bts imagines suga #bts fics #bts fic #bon voyage season 4

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shemakesmusic-uk · 3 years

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Wallice has shared her subversive new single 'Hey Michael'. 'Hey Michael' amplifies her blood-thirsty nature, a revenge anthem that finds Wallice turning into a worse villain than her erstwhile love interest. A song about toxic tendencies and how they manifest in our lives, 'Hey Michael' twists and turns around American Psycho imagery. Wallice labels "a revenge anthem for anyone who has encountered a gaslighting, manipulative person. It’s what I wish I would have said to all the ‘Michael’s’ I have met in my life. It can be substituted by many names, we all know or have met a ‘Michael’ though. Somehow the world revolves around them and they just can’t catch a break, because they never do anything wrong and it’s usually your fault. You should have listened to your gut instinct and swiped left on this Michael. This isn’t a man-hating song, it’s just something many people can relate to. Sometimes it’s embarrassing to admit just how bad a friend, date, or romantic partner was and a lot of the time, I would just smile and laugh off stupid remarks but when I think back, I wish I had told them off. But at the same time, my persona in the song is not the best person either. I literally say: I think I want to start a fight, which one is your girlfriend? The whole song is funny because I am so focused on how shitty Michael is that I don’t even think about how shitty I might be as well." Directed by Phil Stillwell, the video takes place at a house party, with Wallice interacting with various 'Michaels' before her behaviour spirals into something much, much worse. [via Clash]

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In the same vein as Massive Attack’s suburban groove and social commentary in the mid 90’s, KITA have captured the rhythm and heartbeat of suburban Pōneke; a city abuzz with a vibrant music and dramatic performance scene in their brand new track and official video, ‘Private Lives’. Weaving together elements of vintage rock, pop and soul, and warm hints of synth, KITA have created a skin-prickling piece of magic with ‘Private Lives’, a deeply beautiful track penned in 2020’s lockdown, that delves into the unknown of what happens when the blinds are shut – the parts of life that are unseen by others. "Standing from my kitchen window during lockdown in Aotearoa, sinister thoughts entered my mind about what could be happening behind closed doors for people”, says front-woman Nikita 雅涵 Tu- Bryant. The video tells the story of a father and daughter’s relationship amongst snapshots of everyday life and its monotonous anonymity, while things aren’t always what they appear on the surface. Late at night the father can finally reveal his true self, adorning makeup and sequins, only to be spied by his daughter. The two then share a special moment of dressing up and dancing together, a true celebration of individuality, self-love and the beauty of self-expression.

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'Just Chemistry' is the third single from Dance Lessons, a London-based, female-fronted and produced trio, creating what they define as Serrated Pop. 'Just Chemistry' is a delicate hymn to the unspoken. Dance Lessons return with their signature sound – minimal production, sleek vocals and intricate arrangements. Ann says: “'Just Chemistry' is about the over-complication of our relationships. It’s about the things that are left unsaid in-between the awkward text messages and conversations, and how the absence of knowing can be misinterpreted as doubt. Last year was a difficult one. For a long time, I felt at the mercy of my emotions. I doubted where things were going. I lived in the future and found it hard to commit to the present. But these moments of not knowing can be equally thrilling and beautiful. And that’s what the song is about: finding beauty in the unspoken. In most cases, it’s chemistry that makes us fall in love. Things end, all is temporary. Let’s not go to war with one another over it.” Nat says on the video: “A friend told us about this weird and wonderful house in North London that feels a little like stepping into an acid trip. We obviously wanted to check it out. It’s completely surreal, all over the place (in a great way) and generally eclectic, which felt inherently us. We instantly wanted to do something there and asked the owner for permission to shoot a music video. We filmed during lockdown and were let loose embracing all the oddness of it. Ann also designed and created the outfit she wears in the video, something she does with most of her wardrobe. It was shot, directed and edited by our hugely talented friends Ben Hanson and Simon Frost from Borderland Studios.”

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Returning with her first offering of the year, North London’s rising star Laurel Smith is ready to reveal her anticipated new single, ‘Out the Cage’ accompanied by an action packed and thrilling cinematic style music video directed by Jeremie Brivet and Jai Garcha. Sticking to her winning recipe of moody, dark, electro-pop production paired with effortlessly edgy tales of narrative lyricism, ‘Out the Cage’ is the next huge single from the young, innovative artist that is sure to follow the same trajectory of success as its predecessor, ‘Game Over’ released late last year. A songwriter and recording artist, Laurel Smith has been writing songs since the age of sixteen. With each single she’s released, Laurel has continued to adapt her sound and aesthetic, consistently honing her craft and evolving her brand. She has carefully carved out her place in an ever crowded industry and proceeds to turn heads at every corner. “‘Out The Cage’ is a song about breaking out from your constraints, both physical and mental. Although it can be interpreted in any way, when I wrote it I created a story around a bored housewife, falling out of love with her husband, she fantasises about tying him up and leaving him to be a badass assassin in a video game type world, roaming the city at night and living a life of unpredictability and excitement”.

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Hailing from the Philippines, singer-songwriter Laica is coming off a breakout 2020. Now the 21-year-old is gearing up for the release of her debut album I’m so fine at being lonely. The first single off the project, 'love u lately' is here, accompanied by a music video directed by Cooper Leith. 'Love u lately' is a relatable and infectious track. The song revolves around dating, understanding mixed signals, and the confusion that surrounds that world. Lyrically, Laica walks us through her experiences here, voicing her thoughts and frustrations about someone who she just can't seem to read right. Production-wise, the track is carried by a pulsing synth and a groovy bass. Together, the track feels upbeat. The vibe created by the production stands in contrast with the more emotional lyrics, making the track complex and interesting. The music video takes the concept of 'love u lately' to the extreme, in a fun and playful way. Laica is seen capturing her dream boy and attempting to use witchcraft to finally win him over. The video has a very DIY feel, which could serve to add to the reliability of the track. It’s a great extension of the track and taps into everyone’s most fantasy-driven realities. [via Earmilk]

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At first, Emily C Browning wasn't sure what to think. Spurned, rejected, and cast aside, she was angry, furious, and - at times - utterly bereft. Usually she'd utilise songwriting as a vessel for her emotions, but when she was so conflicted, and feeling so negative, that it just didn't enter her mind. The Christchurch, New Zealand artist needed to take a step back, and when she located some perspective, she was ready to act. New single 'I Wasn't Into You Anyway' is a soaring slice of revenge, one that finds Emily C Browning taking full control of her music. Her first solo production credit, its reminiscent of those surging, empowering Maggie Rogers bops, while also containing similar DNA to Sharon Van Etten's work. Lyrically, it's absolutely her own creation, with Emily leaning on those often-hidden feelings. She comments... "Everyday for a month I wrote in my journal: I want to write a song about feeling rejected. But I couldn’t figure out how to keep it light and funny, it can be quite a painful topic and I didn’t want to sound too heavy. But I kept working on it everyday and came up with this song. I then spent another month recording it, trying to capture a sound that stayed upbeat and playful. I put so much time and energy into the song that I ended up completely forgetting about the person who rejected me in the first place (honest, I swear)." [via Clash]

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Alt-pop force Holly Humberstone returns with new single 'Haunted House'. The songwriter's potent debut EP Falling Asleep At The Wheel was a sensation, racking up more than 100 million global streams. A bona fide phenomenon, Holly returns with a single that displays a more nuanced, reflective side to her work. 'Haunted House' digs into childhood, and looks at the way memory can frame the way we construct our identities. She comments: "I wrote this song about the old and characterful house I grew up in. The house is such a huge part of who I am and our family. With my sisters and I moving out and living separate lives, coming home feels very comforting and one of the only things keeping us all connected." Playing with concrete imagery and no small degree of invention, 'Haunted House' connects art to life in an enchanting fashion. She adds: "The house is almost falling down around us now though, and we’ve realised that pretty soon we’ll be forced to leave. There’s a cellar full of meat hooks and a climate so damp mushrooms grow out of the walls. Loads of people have probably died here in the past but I’ve always felt really safe. It’s like a seventh family member. It’s part of me." [via Clash]

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In 2019, the Boston-born and Brooklyn-based indie rock album Crumb released their debut album Jinx. Crumb haven’t yet announced plans to follow that album up, but they’re definitely working towards something. Last month, the band came out with a one-off single called 'Trophy.' Now, they’ve followed that one with two new tracks, and they’re both winners. The new songs 'BNR' and 'Balloon' both fit nicely into Crumb’s comfort zone. The band’s sound is a rich, sophisticated take on psychedelia, with blissed-out lead vocals from Lila Ramani and with some great funky drum action. The band co-produced both songs with Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado, who’s done great recent work with people like Father John Misty and Weyes Blood and the Killers and who knows how to make oblique ’70s-style pop sound good. But Crumb themselves deserve a ton of credit for coming up with a sound this layered and weird. They’re the rare circa-2021 band who might remind you of Broadcast. In a press release, Ramani says, “‘BNR’ is an ode to my favorite colors. I had a weird obsession with those colors in winter 2018-2019 and felt like they would follow me around everywhere I went." 'BNR' also has a cool music video. Director Joe Mischo starts the clip off as a hallucinatory reverie, but he turns it sharply towards horror at the end. [via Stereogum]

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Last year, Limerick poet/musician Sinead O’Brien released her debut EP, Drowning In Blessings. It was a unique work, a handful of songs featuring O’Brien’s sing-speak over spindly, post-punk guitars. It garnered O’Brien a bit of buzz overseas, and it left you wondering where she might take her music from there. Now, O’Brien’s back with a new song called 'Kid Stuff.' “‘Kid Stuff’ shows up all different tones on different days,” O’Brien said in a statement. “There’s something alive in it which cannot be caught or told. It is direct but complex; it contains chapters. This feels like our purest and most succinct expression yet.” Like Drowning In Blessings, 'Kid Stuff' found O’Brien working with Speedy Wunderground mastermind Dan Carey. Musically, it hints at a level up moment for O’Brien. There was something alluring and jagged about Drowning In Blessings, but 'Kid Stuff' places her usual approach over a song that is surprisingly groovy — maybe even a little danceable. It comes with a video directed by Saskia Dixie. [via Stereogum]

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Das Beat are made up of German actress and vocalist Eddie Rabenberger and Agor of Blue Hawaii. The pair have just shared their first single 'Bubble' online now and are set to release their debut EP Identität on June 4 via Arbutus Records. Born in Berlin during 2020’s legendary lockdown, Das Beat seeks to blast both boredom and boundary. Dabbling in German New Wave, Italo Disco, Indie & Dance, their sound is unified by vocals from Eddie Rabenberger, sung in German and English. Amidst playful lyrics one finds a strong underlying pulse (das “beat”), pinning down the duo’s meandering atmospherics, dreamy synths, guitars and percussion. The duo is half-Canadian and half-German. Agor (of Blue Hawaii), moved to Berlin from Montreal in 2018. Eddie is a theatre actress originally hailing from a small town in Bavaria. Together they find a strange but alluring symbiosis - like Giorgio Moroder meets Nico, or Gina X Performance meets The Prodigy.

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St. Vincent has fully embraced the ’70s aesthetic for her retro-sounding new record, Daddy’s Home. Now, she’s diving headlong into the animation styles of the era with the video for 'The Melting of the Sun'. Presented as a “betamax deluxe release” rip from “Candy’s Music Video Archives,” the clip blends live action shots of St. Vincent herself with the wavy, intermittent animation frames any Schoolhouse Rock student is familiar with. The psychedelic lines fit a song called 'The Melting of the Sun' perfectly, as do the drawings of the legends mentioned in the song’s lyrics like Nina Simone, Joni Mitchell, and Tori Amos. St. Vincent co-directed the clip with Bill Benz, while Chris McD provided the animation. [via Consequence]

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Bay Area slowcore trio Sour Widows have released a new single, 'Bathroom Stall,' from their forthcoming EP Crossing Over, which they announced last month with its title track. The song’s build-up is subtle and poignant like Sufjan Stevens, but Maia Sinaiko’s evocative, sweeping vocals are one-of-a-kind, and the lyrics are graphic and tragic: “Do you remember it like I do?/ Your lips turned blue I had my fingers in your mouth/ And I couldn’t get them out.” Sinaiko said of the song: "This song is about a relationship I had with someone who struggled with addiction, who very tragically passed away three years ago while we were together. It’s about some moments we shared, and how it feels to walk around carrying that person and those experiences with me while the world stays normal. I wrote the song because I wanted to preserve and document what happened to me. to write out the scary stuff and just let it sit there forever. I think its funny that its called 'Bathroom Stall' and that it has that image in it: the song goes from heavy and dark to ordinary and totally pedestrian in a sentence, which feels absurd. And that’s kind of what it’s like to grieve. That’s kind of what’s hard to explain about grief, how absurd it is. Part of you goes to a different planet and part of you stays walking around like an alien on Earth, going to the bathroom and looking at the moon and shit." [via Stereogum]

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As JUNO-nominated singer Kandle Osborne prepares to launch her new project, Set The Fire this spring, she shares the album’s third single, 'Misty Morning.' From being penned on a napkin while abroad to a Vancouver studio, 'Misty Morning' is a sonic journey that echoes soulful vulnerability and an honest reflection of realizing true love. For the video, Kandle reconnects with 'Honey Trap' director, Brandon William Fletcher, to create classic 40s noir-inspired cine-magic, filmed along the Vancouver coastline and within the lush landscape of Stanley Park. Kandle says: “‘Misty Morning’ is my first real love song, captured on a napkin while in Ischia, Italy when I was truly happy. My songwriting usually comes from a place of turmoil and catharsis, but this was simply a snapshot of a perfect, vulnerable moment. In recording it, I wanted to hide behind lush orchestration, but my producer/ best friend Michael Rendall had other ideas. He wanted to strip it down to just piano & a single vocal to take me out of my comfort zone and re-capture the open-hearted feelings I had while writing it. The song and the recording both hold for me a time when I dropped my guard for pure authentic love in spite of all my flaws and failures. In that moment, I felt my true value as a whole person for the first time.”

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On 'Vertigo,' Alice Merton’s first single of 2021, the 27-year-old describes the long road from uncertainty back to self-confidence. It emphasizes the unrest that seizes her again and again, the thought: “Why can’t I just let it go?” These contradicting thoughts and emotions that are so familiar to all of us sum up to an overwhelmingly positive effect - 'Vertigo' leaves you empowered rather than anxious: A powerful indie pop arrangement with distorted guitars, plus Alice Merton’s crystal-clear voice. The result is reminiscent of the British Invasion, with no air of self-doubt. With its energetic live qualities, 'Vertigo' feeds an appetite for summer festivals and concerts that will definitely return at some point. Largely responsible for this is the Canadian producer Koz, a multiple Grammy nominee, who has worked with Dua Lipa ('Physical') among others. Here, too, he adds on to what has already made Alice Merton stand out from the crowd in the past - her classic pop appeal - with an uncompromising and indie attitude. This enables Alice to take another big step: She equally encourages a shaken generation and herself that there will be easy summers again. That you can dance again and lie in each other's arms. That it is absolutely fine to have many facets, to not always be clear, and that strength and weakness are not mutually exclusive.

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Canadian artist Olivia Lunny's new release 'Sad To See You Happy' is a shamelessly poppy track centering an acutely relatable break-up narrative. The Canadian artist follows up her breakthrough success with a bouncy cut to soundtrack 2021’s long-awaited spring. There's a relatable tale of break-up at the heart of the gloriously poppy new single, belied by percussive instrumentation that creates a warm, nostalgic feel. [via Line Of Best Fit]

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After sharing the single last month, Charlotte Adigéry is now revealing the brand new video for ‘Bear With Me (and I’ll stand bare before you)’. The first new music since her 2019 debut EP Zandoli, Charlotte says of the video, “The video is about being confined thus confronted to the way we live. The cruel irony of having the privilege of standing still, questioning and observing my life in all safety while others are fighting for theirs. On the other hand, the video is about trying to stay sane while feeling that the walls are closing in on you. Embracing boredom and finding joy in the little things in life.” Director Alice Kunisue adds, “When I listened to Charlotte’s song and what it meant for her and Bolis, I wanted the video to visually encapsulate that feeling of being stuck inside and confronted to our deeper selves while paradoxically sensing the chaos going on in the outside world without being able to do anything about it. Choosing to film an apartment room from one single angle was a way to reflect that narrowness of thought that we all experienced, but also a constraint that allowed us to explore and develop visual ideas within a narrow system, in a way having to think only inside the box, which artistically was a fun challenge.” [via DIY]

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Millie Turner has shared a video for ‘Concrete Tragedy’. It’s a cut from her upcoming mini-album Eye Of The Storm, set for release on May 16, which also features a rework of breakout song ‘(Breathe) Underwater’. “This video is a visual representation of dancing on your own,” she says of the clip. “Combining the many parts of who we are when we’re by ourselves, I wanted it to feel like you’re entering a world of imagination that comes alive when we express ourselves.” [via Dork]

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Doja Cat and SZA have come together for a new single called 'Kiss Me More.' When the song was announced Wednesday night, the internet flipped out, which is to be expected with these two — especially Doja Cat, who is regularly going viral these days for all kinds of reasons. When it comes to collaborations, she always finds the best people. That includes Saweetie, who appeared on Doja’s recent 'Best Friend' but then claimed that it was released against her wishes. Given SZA’s long history of public frustration over TDE Records holding back her new album, she is probably happy to have any new music out. Despite recent single 'Good Days' hitting the top 10, her restless fanbase is still awaiting a follow-up to 2017’s iconic Ctrl. 'Kiss Me More' is the first single from Doja’s new album Planet Her, scheduled for release this summer. It returns to the disco vibes of Doja’s #1 hit 'Say So,' this time with no apparent resemblance to any Skylar Spence song. [via Stereogum]

#videos of the week #wallice #kita #dance lessons #laurel smith #laica #emily c. browning #holly humberstone #crumb #st. vincent #sour widows #kandle #alice merton #olivia lunny #charlotte adigery #millie turner #doja cat #sza

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