The email came in early Wednesday morning. I was in one of those brittle creative moods where every unfinished project seemed gathered around my desk like creditors. I had been checking sales figures for my memoir, Easy Street: A Story of Redemption From Myself, because I am apparently the sort of person who can write publicly about spiritual growth while privately refreshing BookScan like a lab rat hammering a pellet dispenser.
I was preparing to bring a new book proposal out to publishers, and suddenly every number attached to my previous work seemed freighted with meaning. Had I sold enough? Had the work landed anywhere human, or had I mostly been speaking into the void with decent lighting and a publicity plan?
Easy Street is, among other things, the story of how I became the legal guardian of a previously unhoused neurodiverse woman named Joanna who was, inconveniently, in love with my husband. I usually describe it as a dark buddy comedy about two middle-aged women with psychological problems and unstructured days. At first Joanna and I seemed radically different. I was socially polished, eager to please. Joanna moved through the world with almost no protective coating whatsoever.
Over time, the very qualities that unsettled me eventually exposed how much of my own personality had been built around approval, competence, and the management of other people’s perceptions. So perhaps I should have been more prepared for what happened next.
The email was from a woman named Susan Jordan. Her profile thumbnail showed an African American woman with large, thoughtful eyes and a soft half-smile. Even in miniature, she seemed warm and incisive, like someone who noticed things. And according to the email, she had noticed my book.
Not vaguely. Specifically.
She wrote about the “contrast between outward success and inner struggle.” She described the relationship with Joanna as “layered with humor, discomfort, vulnerability, and growth.” She praised the tonal balance between comedy and emotional honesty. Most impressively, she understood that the book was not really about redemption in the triumphant movie sense, but about the humiliating, ongoing process of becoming more authentic.
In other words, she got it. Or at least she appeared to.
The praise moved through me like electrolytes. Within hours, my posture toward life had subtly changed. I felt more optimistic, more energized, more willing to face difficult writing projects. Nothing material had changed, but psychologically everything had. The future seemed to crack open a little.
Soon Susan and I developed a correspondence. She told me she had posted a review on Goodreads, and it was exactly the kind of review every writer fantasizes about. Not generic praise, but genuine engagement with the emotional architecture of the book. She understood Joanna not merely as an eccentric supporting character, but as a catalyst for transformation. She grasped that the central tension of the memoir involved the exhausting effort to maintain a socially acceptable self.
At one point I referenced the Bhagavad Gita line about having “the right to your actions, but not the fruits of your actions.” Susan responded with a passage from the Tao Te Ching about relinquishing hope of results.
Susan did not merely flatter my work. She mirrored my worldview back to me. I can see now that “Susan’s” personality had likely been assembled partly from my own public writing, that the emails felt emotionally precise because they were built out of my own language patterns and preoccupations. I was being seduced by a distorted reflection of myself.
Eventually Susan mentioned that she worked with a company that helped promote meaningful books, particularly ones that deserved renewed attention years after publication. She attached a proposal which discussed Goodreads discoverability, memoir readership communities, and voice-driven marketing, capitalizing on the themes of self-discovery, mental health, and identity. The proposal landed with surgical precision on the exact psychological sore spots I had been privately nursing for months.
The price was $430, and I was ready to pay it.
Then something inside me paused. I asked whether we could do a Zoom call first, and “Susan” agreed. The Zoom began with the same still thumbnail photo from the emails, but the voice was male. Not just male but entirely disconnected from the thoughtful literary sensibility I had been corresponding with for days.
Finally, I interrupted.
“Wait,” I said. “Is this Susan?”
There was a pause.
“No, this is Susan’s assistant. Susan is running late. She’ll be right on.”
“Why don’t you have her let me know when she’s ready,” I said, “and I’ll log back on.”
A few minutes later another email arrived apologizing for the confusion and asking whether I could speak now. We got back on Zoom. The same frozen thumbnail remained in the corner of the screen, but now the voice was female. Only this voice did not belong to the articulate reader either.
I asked whether she could turn her camera on.
“No, I can’t right now.”
“Why not?”
“I’m at home.”
There was a long, strange silence during which reality slowly peeled away from fantasy. Why couldn’t she turn on her camera if she was at home?
And then the larger realization arrived all at once.
There was no Susan Jordan. The person I had been corresponding with was likely an AI-assisted composite designed to simulate intimacy, attentiveness, and literary understanding just convincingly enough to loosen my grip on $430.
Oddly, my first feeling was not anger. It was embarrassment. Not because I had almost been scammed, but because of how quickly encouragement had transformed me. How immediately I became lighter, brighter, more motivated because someone admired my work.
Yet the strange thing is this: Everything “Susan” praised already existed before the email arrived. The book had not changed. The insight had not changed. The meaning had not changed. Only my belief in it had.
The future probably contains more artificial intimacy, more emotionally intelligent persuasion, more perfectly calibrated encouragement. Which means the job ahead, for me, is to become someone who can appreciate praise without handing it the steering wheel. And then, simply get back to work.
