A Tennessee homemaker entered the online world of romance writers and it became, in her words, “an addiction.” Things went downhill from there.
Susan Meachen, a romance novelist in Tennessee, has faced questions from police about faking her own death online.Jessica Tezak for The New York Times
Late Monday morning, two police officers drove up a gravel driveway to a mobile home in Benton, Tenn., a tiny town in the foothills of the southern Appalachians, to question Susan Meachen, a 47-year-old homemaker and author of romance novels.
She had been expecting them. For a week, she had been the focus of a scandal within the online subculture of self-published romance writers, part of the literary world sometimes known as “Romancelandia.”
The police wanted to talk to Ms. Meachen about faking her own death. In the fall of 2020, a post announcing she had died had appeared on her Facebook page, where she had often described her struggles with mental health and complained of poor treatment at the hands of other writers.
The post, apparently written by her daughter, led many to assume she had died by suicide. It sent fans and writers into a spiral of grief and introspection, wondering how their sisterhood had turned so poisonous.
But she wasn’t dead. Last week, to the shock of her online community, Ms. Meachen returned to her page to say she was back and now “in a good place,” and ready to resume writing under her own name. She playfully concluded: “Let the fun begin.”
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