Fake – Stephanie Wood

The thing about dating a writer is that you’ve got to accept the fact that your relationship might be used in their work one day. That goes double if you’re dating a journalist, and triple if you do them wrong. A man (pseudonym ‘Joe’) found that out to his peril when his romance with Fairfax journalist Stephanie Wood went sour. First, there was an article in Good Weekend, then there was Fake. Don’t feel too sorry for Joe, though: he thoroughly deserved to have Wood read him to filth in a public forum.

Wood was grappling with being an unmarried, childless woman of a certain age when she reluctantly dipped her toe in the world of online dating. That’s where she met Joe. At first, she wasn’t all that into him, but he quickly won her over with his humility, his generosity, and his flattery.

Joe presented himself as a former architect turned property developer, with the heart of a farmer. He told Wood he spent his weekends at his small country shack, wrangling his flock of sheep. He had two children from a previous marriage to a “crazy” woman. He dreamed of expanding his farming operations, with a loving woman by his side. It all sounds pretty standard for a mid-life man, doesn’t it?

The hint is in the book’s title, of course: Joe’s a fake. It’s all a lie.

The implosion of Joe’s deception starts slowly, with cancelled plans and odd inconsistencies. He would be called away from events and dates by family emergencies, farming crises, illness, business. He’d find every excuse under the sun to avoid introducing Wood to his mother. He never once invited Wood into his house – and the one time she got close to it, he pulled her away before she could cross the threshold.

In the early chapters of Fake, you want to scream at Wood to trust her gut. Every ‘sorry can’t make it’ text message is a red flag to add to Joe’s collection. To her credit, she absolutely acknowledges and takes responsibility for ignoring her intuition. She confused her legitimate concerns about Joe’s behaviour with her own long-held anxiety. She tried too hard to be the ‘cool girl’. She was nail-bitingly credulous – but, of course, all of this is only obvious in hindsight.

Eventually, Wood discovers the truth. Joe is hardly a farmer, barely a former architect, not at all a property developer. He wasn’t even single when they met – he had at least one other long-term girlfriend that he was seeing at the same time. He goes no-contact as soon as Wood calls him out, naturally, but using her investigative skills from work she’s able to piece together some of the puzzle of his ‘real’ life. He’s left a pretty significant paper trail of destruction and debt in his wake, after all, and the people he’s screwed over are pretty happy to finally have the chance to talk about it.

Fake differs from the standard romantic con narrative in a couple of defining ways. First, Joe wasn’t just an online presence in Stephanie’s life. Unlike the villains of catfishing scams, who take on an online persona to dupe the victim and avoid actually interacting with them IRL, Joe fronted up from the start. It’s a lot harder to doubt a man who’s sleeping in your bed every night and waking up next to you in the morning.

Secondly, Wood wasn’t financially scammed. Joe never asked her for money, or to ‘invest’ in one of his deals. Most of the time, he paid for dinners and couples’ getaways.

If Joe had asked me for money, I would have seen him [for what he was] immediately. But that wasn’t what he wanted to take from me, or from Kirstie. He needed something else from us: he needed us to play supporting roles to his magnificent lead character in the boundless, exuberant pantomime of his life. And he needed us to fill the role of audience members, too: he needed us to clap.

Fake (Page 263)

So, Wood might not have lost any money, but she was emotionally defrauded – a particularly sinister type of deception that is somehow more stigmatised than transferring money to a Nigerian prince.

Wood mentions Kirstie in the passage above – Kirstie being Joe’s other girlfriend. A twisted kind of camaraderie emerges between the women that he fooled. After calling to warn her about a forthcoming article on Joe’s behaviour, Wood becomes Kirstie’s close friend and confidante as she extricates herself from his deceptions. They bond over their shared mistreatment and devastation, compare notes on the ‘emergencies’ that took Joe away from planned events or prevented them from seeing the houses he said he was buying or already owned. It’s nice that Fake isn’t totally introspective, and Wood doesn’t only focus on Joe’s destruction in her own life. She gives significant weight to the harm he has done to others, too.

And she doesn’t stop there: Wood reviews other cases of romantic manipulation, like that experienced by NBC producer Benita Alexander (who was famously scammed by celebrity surgeon Paolo Macchiarini). She explores the online communities of people in recovery from these types of relationships. She reads up on narcissism, antisocial personality disorders, and the psychological fault lines that give rise to this kind of exploitative behaviour. However, for all her digging, she can’t really get to the bottom of why Joe is the way that he is. She’s forced to look inward instead, and comes to a kind of peace on her own.

My main criticism of Fake is that Wood takes a rather traditional media approach to the subject (which shouldn’t be surprising, given that she’s a newspaper journalist). She spends relatively little time interrogating how the emergence of dating apps has made it easier for would-be lovers to cast a spell over their victims, or how the digital footprint left behind has made it easier for their lies to be uncovered.

Still, ultimately, her advice is good, and she spells it out in the epilogue of Fake: resist wilful blindness in a love affair. Ask questions, and demand satisfactory answers. You might not be able to avoid getting your heart-broken, but you can at least avoid discovering that your farmer boyfriend has never drenched a sheep in his life.