My Immortal: why the famously awful Harry Potter fanfiction isn't bad at all

The epilogue of the final Harry Potter book, which sees the boy wizard packing off his son from King’s Cross for his first school year at Hogwarts, takes place on 1 September 2017. The real-life station was duly packed two weeks ago with fans eager to mark the date. But that wasn’t the only big moment for Potter fans this month: more than a decade since it was first published online, the identity of the mysterious author behind the notoriously awful fanfiction My Immortal was finally revealed. It was an unveiling deemed so momentous by the internet that the Daily Dot compared it to “JD Salinger launching a public Twitter account”.

After a decade of fervent internet sleuthing failed to uncover her identity, young adult fiction (YA) author Rose Christo identified herself as Tara Gillespie AKA XXXbloodyrists666XXX, the author of what is widely deemed the worst fanfic ever written (try a Google search, it comes up). Christo did so in part to debunk the theory that Lani Sarem, who recently made headlines when she was accused of faking sales to make the New York Times bestseller list, was the author. An interview with Buzzfeed, in which Christo revealed a USB drive that contained original documents proving her claim, also announced that the whole saga is set to be told in her forthcoming memoir Under the Same Stars, which will cover how and why she wrote My Immortal alongside her search for her brother in New York’s foster-care system.

I’m not surprised that XXXbloodyrists666XX AKA Gillespie AKA Christo appears to have real writing chops. I’m a longtime fan of the gothic extravaganza that is My Immortal; I even performed a live reading of it at the Brighton Fringe festival. It’s far more than a rehash of JK Rowling – for a start, the main character isn’t Harry, it’s an American exchange student called Ebony. She is sometimes also Enoby, because among its foibles, My Immortal is so peppered with typos that reading it is like interpreting ancient runes.

It begins with lines I know by heart:

Hi my name is Ebony Dark’ness Dementia Raven Way and I have long ebony black hair (that’s how I got my name) with purple streaks and red tips that reaches my mid-back and icy blue eyes like limpid tears.

A good chunk of the 20,000 words that follow are dedicated to describing Ebony’s amazing array of Hot Topic outfits (“I was wearing a blak plaid miniskirt with hot pink fishnetz, a sexy blak MCR corset and blak stiletto boots with pink pentagroms on dem. My earrings were blake Satanist sins and my raven hair was all around me to my mid-black.”) And the writing style is quite distinct from Rowling’s: “‘What the fuck r u doing!’ I shooted arngrily. Snoop laughed meanly. He polled down his pants. I gasped – there was a Dork Mark on his you-know-wut! 11!”

Most of the characters have had their names changed, for ostensibly goth reasons: Harry is Vampire Potter, Ron is Diablo, Hermione is Bloody Mary Smith. Something resembling a plot occurs when Ebony’s relationship with villain Draco Malfoy is put in terrible jeopardy when she is sent back in time to seduce a young Voldemort. At one point, Marty McFly even turns up, from another realm entirely.

Even though My Immortal is seriously, often knowingly, funny, I always found it hard to believe that it was just clumsy teenage angst, devoid of any earnest effort by a real-life Ebony. Christo now says she wrote it as a “troll fic”, a deliberate parody – but as we have also learned with her reveal, she wrote it at the age of 15 or 16. So perhaps it was a bit of both: the author of My Immortal was a real teen girl trying her hand at writing, with japes.

But whether Christo intended Ebony as a joke or not, her jet-tressed heroine is a classic example of a “Mary Sue”: the idealised, annoyingly perfect cypher for the author that turns up all too often in fanfiction. It’s often meant as a term of derision – but My Immortal shows how, even at their most indulgent, Mary Sue stories can be engrossing and heartfelt. Because under the black leather, it is just a story about a teenage girl who wants to dress up in amazing clothes and date Draco Malfoy. It thereby captures a more painful and poignant truth about being a regular teenager than Rowling’s original series achieves with many, many more words – however accurately spelled.

Which might, I hope, incline you to look past the ridicule and read My Immortal here.