Bestselling author who told lies leaves us wondering why

My first thought on reading the lies bestselling author Dan Mallory is accused of telling was: ‘did he dupe me?’ There were red flags.

Dan Mallory aka AJ Finn in Melbourne last year. Picture: David Crosling

The New Yorker last week published a 12,000-word essay about Dan Mallory, who writes under the name AJ Finn. His debut novel, The Woman in the Window, went to No 1 in Australia.

I’m paraphrasing, but Mallory is accused of being a liar, having told friends he had cancer when he didn’t; that his mum was dead when she isn’t; that he has a PhD from Oxford when he hasn’t. I’m sure you get the picture.

My first thought on reading this: did he dupe me? Because I met Mallory last year, when he came to Sydney to promote his book. In fact, I did a podcast with him, me and the team from online book site Better Reading, and I remember that I really liked him — because honestly why wouldn’t I?

He’s completely charming. And if you’re a clinical psychologist, there’s a red flag right there.

Anyway, I went back and replayed the podcast, in which I’d started by asking him whether I should call him Dan or AJ.

“Well, since we’re now friends, Dan,” he said, and there’s another flag, probably. I listened on: Mallory didn’t tell me that he had cancer, and he didn’t say that his mum was dead (that would have been a difficult one to pull off, given he was travelling with her). He did say he had a PhD from Oxford; and that he’d been treated for depression with ketamine (possible, but it’s best known as a horse tranquilliser and isn’t readily available).

Here’s what’s interesting, however: Mallory’s book is about a woman with mental health problems. He explained that he had, at age 21, been diagnosed with clinical depression. Then, “three years ago, I found myself in the office of a Russian psychiatrist, who said: I don’t think you’ve got depression, I think you’ve got a form of bipolar … He ramped me up on new meds” and within six weeks Mallory was “totally transformed” and keen to talk about mental health.

“It is little understood, it is much stigmatised,” he said.

“I’m living proof that you can struggle with serious mental illness and still be a success.”

This tallies with what Mallory told The New Yorker after his lies were exposed (they weren’t small lies: he apparently told some people he was dying from a brain tumour; imagine your distress if you were a close friend or colleague.)

But in his statement he went further, saying he felt “intensely ashamed of my psychological struggles — for 15 years … I was utterly terrified of what people would think of me if they knew”.

So, to be clear, he’s saying he lied about having cancer so he didn’t have to admit to having a mental illness.

Mallory went on to say that his bipolar disorder brought on “delusional thoughts” and “memory problems”, meaning he had also now forgotten much of his wrongdoing.

Now, many readers will of course be thinking: Pfft! He’s a conman, pure and simple. Conning who, though? And conning why? Some people — I’m thinking online wellness blogger Belle Gibson — lie about having cancer in the hope of profiting somehow. Some writers — James Frey, Norma Khouri — create a new persona to sell fake memoir.

Some people lie about being in love, to defraud women of their money (Hamish McLaren, who is the subject of The Australian’s new podcast series, Who the Hell is Hamish?); some people lie about being sick because they enjoy the care and attention (that’s Munchausen syndrome).

What’s the point of Mallory’s lies? I sought some expert opinion, which comes with a caveat: Michael Berk is the Alfred Deakin professor of psychiatry in the school of medicine at Deakin University, but he’s never met Mallory, so what follows is just a discussion about lies and the lying liars who tell them.

“Lying is strategic, calculated behaviour,” says Berk. “It is designed to achieve a certain outcome. Often it’s to make the person seem more fascinating than they actually are. The goal may be fame and fortune, to advance oneself somehow. And when you find lies with those other words you used — charming, charismatic — you tend to also find other unethical behaviour, such as fraud.

“I’m not saying that’s the case with this particular gentleman. I’m saying if you see that particular road, you question if it points to Rome.”

Well, then, what of the idea that Mallory doesn’t remember a lot of the lies he told?

“For the most part, if one has a true memory disorder — dementia is a good example — memory loss will be around all manner of things,” says Berk. “You can’t remember where you put your keys. You can’t remember people’s names.”

Dryly, he adds: “You don’t selectively forget all the things you did that got you into trouble.” Berk would never say so — they’ve never met, and so on — but it could well be that Mallory is just a bullshitter (that’s an Australian diagnosis, obviously).

If so — and as many people on the books forums online are asking — does it matter? Because it’s not like he’s taken anyone’s money or tried to pass off his book as a memoir.

The New York Times has suggested that Mallory’s book “owes a debt” to several others, but ­nobody has yet come out with the P-word: plagiarism.

“Does it matter?” says Berk, and although I can’t see him — we’re talking on the phone — I can feel his eyebrows shooting up. “Does it matter not to deceive people? Does it matter to be ethical in our dealings with others? Of course it matters.”

It matters morally — a nebulous concept these days, I know — but also because lies create problems for other people.

Melbourne University’s Patrick McGorry says the destigmatisation of mental health is one of the great achievements of the public square.

People now talk openly about the struggle, and lives have been saved in the process. He’s wary of people using “depression, bipolar” to explain away miserable ­behaviour.

“People who have depression don’t normally go around making things up,” he says.

“We really mustn’t let that idea take hold. People who have bipolar are not liars. We have to be clear about that.”

Also, if you do actually have cancer, how do you feel about somebody going around pretending to have it? You’d be forgiven, I think, for wanting to hand it right over to them, if they want it so much.

Anyway, after reading The New Yorker and playing back the podcast, part of me thought: OK, is it possible that Mallory as a younger man felt for reasons that maybe even he didn’t understand that he wasn’t enough somehow, and that he therefore had to hide and lie?

And maybe by the time he got to Australia, those issues were behind him. He’d been diagnosed, treated with psychotherapy, and he was finally the success he always wanted to be (although, ask any psychologist, they’ll tell you that if you’re not enough without it, having it won’t help).

If so, this is something of a ­redemption story, and maybe there’s hope for all of us. And so I decided to reach out, to say: hey, you probably don’t remember me, but we met, and your friends in Australia are feeling a bit bruised, and what exactly has happened here? And if you’re betting that I never heard back — well, you’d be right.