In this recent Vanity Fair article, writer Vincenzo Barney describes meeting now 64 year old Augusta Britt, one time foster child and muse of American writer Cormac McCarthy.

When McCarthy was 42, writing his 4th novel but not well known, 16-year-old Augusta Britt met McCarthy at the motel where she’d take showers. By then Augusta had been in foster care for 5 years and its wasn’t safe to have a shower in the home she was currently living in.

Augusta recognizes McCarthy from his photo on the back of the book she’s reading – reading is another safe haven for the girl – and introduces herself.

Years later, during the 1980s when the two were no longer together, McCarthy sent her the manuscript of All The Pretty Horses (published in 1992).

Augusta realized then he’d been writing about her.

“I felt kind of violated” she says “All these painful experiences regurgitated and rearranged into fiction. I didn’t know how to talk to Cormac about it because Cormac was the most important person in my life. I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?...”