So this is weird. Along the same vein as James Frey who wrote the memoir a Million Little Pieces that turned out to be mostly untrue as well as the author J.T. Leroy, who wrote a few books that I enjoyed under the guise of being a drug addicted, HIV afflicted teenage male hustler who was really a middle aged woman named Laura, one of my Diaryland buddies has revealed herself as being a character in a book and not real at all.
For the last 2 years, I have been reading the Diaryland diary of who I thought was a 15 year old phenom named Frances Isabelle Nash, or F-I-N. I can�t remember if I found her diary or if she found mine first, but we began reading each other and leaving the occasional comments on each others entries. I was extremely impressed with her writing ability. At first I would never have guessed she was still in high school, and was blown away that someone so young had such a gift for words. I began to care about her and would try to leave as many encouraging comments as I could as she meandered her way through adolescence. I always enjoyed the comments and insights she would write in return on my site.
As time went on, we would comment less, but I read just about every entry she posted.
When the birth of my son sent me away from my internet routine, I was unable to read F-I-N�s latest entries until I returned to work 5 months later. I settled in to do some catching up when to my surprise her last entry was a confession. F-I-N was actually the invention of a 33 year old female professor named Crissa-Jean Chappell who was writing a book. F-I-N was the main character of her young adult novel
Total Constant Order. What? Excuse me?
Of course I know that the internet is a veritable breeding ground for people to misrepresent themselves and she is not the first blogger to pull the wool over the eyes of her readers, but how strange just the same. Were we best friends? No, but I did consider her a friend and she was on my top 8 friend list on myspace! She even did a guest post for me once. This is what I wrote about her at the time: �F-I-N is not only one of my favorite Diaryland writers she is one of my favorite writers, period. She has an amazing talent with the written word and is also a fabulous artist. The remarkable part is that she is still in high school. The brilliant F-I-N, thank you for your persevering loveliness. If y'all have never read F-I-N before, please rush over to her site. I would read endless books by her�.
I think I would be less wigged out if this author simply wrote as F-I-N and did not actually become her. She even had a male friend named Thayer-P who had his own photo blog I would check each time he updated. Now I know he was also a fabrication and I feel a bit like a schmuck.
Having said all that, I do wish Crissa-jean Chappell the best of luck with her book, I always thought she should be published.
F-I-N R-I-P.