Great American novelist Cormac McCarthy was defensively private and did not reveal much about the inspiration behind his books – or about himself. But the author, who died in 2023apparently lived out much of his bestseller “All the Pretty Horses” with a woman named Augusta Britt.

She was 16 when she met the then 42-year-old author in 1976.

Britt, now 64, guarded her identity and her story for nearly five decades, revealing herself publicly as the writer’s “only secret muse” in a Vanity Fair profile published this week. Author Vincenzo Barney claims that many of the Pulitzer Prize-winning leading men were inspired by Britt, a “five-four-four badass Finnish-American cowgirl … whose reality, McCarthy admitted in his early love letters to her, he had trouble coming to grips with in.'”

Britt’s story has “always been there, beneath the surface, between the lines of the novels’ catty subconscious,” writes Barney. She had a strong presence during “The Road” author’s acclaimed “Border Trilogy”, inspired Carla Jean in “No Country for Old Men”, was Alicia in “The Passenger” and a nurse named Wanda in “Suttree”. Horses identical to her breeds appeared in the 2013 film “The Counselor,” in which Penélope Cruz plays a character based on her.

“Cormac always wanted me to tell my story,” Britt said. “He was always encouraging me to write a book. He’d say, ‘Somebody’s going to do it eventually, and it might as well be you.’ But I just could never bring myself.”

Barney said he connected with Britt after she left him a pointed comment about his Substack review of McCarthy’s 2022 novel The Passenger – a review that McCarthy told her that “something good will come of it.” Then she sought out Barney and insisted on speaking only to him, rather two other McCarthy biographers vying for her attention.

She invited Barney to Tucson to hear her story, and they spent nine months together. McCarthy, she said, had warned her that she “couldn’t hide forever,” and she readily shared 47 (sometimes erotic) love letters the “Blood Meridian” scribe wrote to her that highlighted their relationship and, with McCarthy’s own words, his “Undying devotion.”

Britt said she had been “so scared” to tell her story – after all, who would believe her? But he had warned her that one day his archives would be opened and people would find out about her.

Britt also inspired the slapstick sidekick Harrogate in “Suttree,” which McCarthy wrote when they first met at a Tucson motel where she went to safely shower away from her foster home.

She was in foster care in Arizona after experiencing “a traumatically violent” event that destroyed her family and returned to the hotel to ask McCarthy to sign a copy of his 1965 debut novel, “The Orchard Keeper.” McCarthy, she said, wanted to know why she was carrying a holster with a Colt revolver in it. It turns out she had stolen it from the man who ran the foster home. She also had a stuffed kitten named John Grady Cole, the hero’s name in McCarthy’s “The Border Trilogy,” which follows three fugitives in possession of a stolen Colt revolver.

“It was the first time someone cared what I thought, asked me my opinions on things,” she said. “And to have this grown man who actually seemed interested in talking to me, that was intensely reassuring. For the first time in my life, I felt just a little spark of hope.”

Frustrated by problems in Britt’s personal life, McCarthy adjusted her birth certificate on his typewriter so she could run away with him to Mexico. It worked but left problems for both of them in its wake.

The optics of their three-decade age difference weren’t ideal for them either. Despite characterizations of premeditated grooming, Britt claimed she felt safer with him than with any of the many men in her young life at whose hands she had, in Barney’s words, “suffered unspeakable violence”. McCarthy — who was married to the second of his three wives, singer Annie De Lisle, when he met Britt — still worried about statutory rape charges and the Mann Act in the early days of their relationship.

She said he was 43 and she was 17 when they had sex for the first time.

“I can’t imagine, after the childhood I had, making love for the first time with anyone but a man, anyone but Cormac. It all felt right. It felt good, she says. “I loved him. He was my security. I really feel that if I hadn’t met him, I would have died young. What I had a problem with came later. When he started writing about me.”

She said McCarthy’s letters, many of which she received before they consummated their relationship, made her uncomfortable at the time because they were so different from how he spoke on the phone or in person. But, she insisted, she never sensed anything inappropriate about their relationship and was more concerned that McCarthy would be misunderstood by the general public if she came forward.

“One thing I’m afraid of is that he’s not around to defend himself,” she said.

About two years into their relationship, she learned he was married. About a year later, she learned that McCarthy had a son about her age.

“It just broke me. What I needed then, so much, was security and safety and trust. Cormac was my life, my role model. He was on a pedestal for me. And when he found out he lied about these things, they became cracks in trust.”

Britt left him about three years into their relationship. They continued to stay in touch, talking regularly for several years and seeing each other when he visited Tucson. When McCarthy sent her the manuscript of “All the Pretty Horses” in the 1980s, she was confused by how much the novel was “full of me, and yet it’s not me.”

“I was surprised that it didn’t feel romantic to be written about. I felt a little offended, she says. “All these painful experiences were resurrected and rearranged into fiction. … I wondered, is that all I was to him, a train wreck to write about?

Britt said she turned down two marriage proposals from McCarthy and lamented how almost all the characters she inspired him to write died. But, she said, after decades she realized he was “killing the darkness” of what happened to her.

“Those things that happen to you, so young and so terrible, you don’t really heal. You just patch yourself up as best you can and move on.”