Author Dan Mallory admits he lied about having cancer and his relatives all dying

Suspense novelist Dan Mallory acknowledged on Thursday that he doesn't just save the fiction for his books.

Mallory's debut novel, The Woman in the Window, was released in 2018, under the pseudonym A.J. Finn. The Woman in the Window instantly became a New York Times bestseller, and will soon be a movie, starring Amy Adams. This week, The New Yorker published an exquisite investigation into Mallory, interviewing colleagues in London and New York who said he told them he had cancer, that his mother died of cancer, and his brother died by suicide. Mallory was able to skate by while working at top publishing houses, they said, and lied about everything from job offers to education.

Mallory's mother is very much alive, and would not speak with The New Yorker. His father did, though, and said his son did not have cancer. "He has his faults, like we all do," he told the magazine. "He's just a tremendous young man." In a statement released by a public relations firm on Thursday, Dan Mallory said he "stated, implied, or allowed others to believe that I was afflicted with a physical malady instead of a psychological one: cancer, specifically." He is sorry for hurting people, he said, as this was "never the goal." He blamed his lying on "crushing depressions, delusional thoughts, morbid obsessions, and memory problems" caused by "severe bipolar II disorder."

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