Angel Hurst (1990-?)
A vanished writer, a falsified pilgrimage, and the beautiful lies we tell to survive failure
(updated version of an entry posted months ago)
The trajectory of Angel Hurst’s brief and catastrophic entrepreneurial period can be traced to her encounter with Matthias Brossard in the autumn before Brexit’s implementation. She was thirty. He was younger, possessed of the particular ugliness that certain women find irresistible: thick forearms, a head like a cement block, and an accent that made middle-aged English tourists order wine they couldn’t afford.
Their courtship, if it can be called that, lasted exactly one cigarette at a bus stop on Camberwell Road. She found him pretentious; he found her “hard” (his word). Fifteen minutes of argument led to three days of sexual exploration on his bedroom carpet, followed by a mutual decision that would destroy both their lives with gothic inevitability.
Hurst was, by all accounts, an unremarkable girl given her class, parentage and upbringing in Gloucester. Middling A-levels, an English degree from a socially acceptable redbrick university; occasional small poems in student papers, influenced initially by Pound and Auden, later by Neruda and Lihn (names she had encountered in a second-year survey course and deployed with the confidence of someone who had never lived in a country where poets starved). She launched herself, bereft of advice, into the real world and found it confusing and hostile in equal measure.
The employment record speaks for itself: call centres in Wales (four months), bookshops in Bristol (seven months), shoe shops in Cheltenham (three months), data entry in Swindon (eleven months; a personal record). She dreamed, still. Of another life, other ways of being, which didn’t require the drudgery of work, but where she could exercise her imagination. It was working at a bar in London that she encountered Brossard, who collected women the way certain men collect stamps: systematically, often without passion, but with considerable technical skill. Neither possessed money worth mentioning, but Brossard at least revelled in his life of shabby apartments, women, and undemanding work. He was happy, though old enough to realise this could not go on.
A New Life
The Brexit referendum provided the necessary catalyst. Hurst, convinced that England had exhausted its capacity for dreams, began to infect Brossard with her anxieties. He listened with the patience of a man who has learned that agreeing with women’s political fears often leads to more interesting conversations in bed. Her vision: a restaurant in Brittany, writing retreats for elderly Anglophiles, walking tours through landscapes she had never seen. His contribution: the smile that had served him well in three countries and the address of his mother’s house near the coast.
Angel’s lack of French or any organisational skills were not considered a hurdle.
Francine Brossard (Rennes, 1954-) received her son and his English girlfriend with an air of resignation. This is a woman who had spent forty years watching people make elaborate plans to justify their failures. She provided floor space, morning coffee, and evening arguments conducted in rapid French while Angel lay on the spare bed, understanding just enough to recognise the sound of her own failures being described in a foreign language.
The restaurant lasted six weeks. Too far from the sea, too English, said the Bulgarian chef on his last day. The writing retreat on the upper floor had another month before they gave up trying to promote it. The walking tours attracted no participants. Each failure followed the same pattern: initial enthusiasm, borrowed money, and then the gradual recognition that desire and competence operate in entirely different spheres of human experience.
By winter, they owed Francine money they would never repay and each other explanations they would never give. Brossard’s smile had become a museum piece, preserved, but no longer functional. Hurst had stopped speaking for days at a time, as if silence might serve as a form of escape from the disaster of her own making.
“We cannot stay here,” he told her one night, his voice carrying the flat certainty. She turned away from him then, perhaps understanding that some conversations mark the end of more one thing.
But Angel Hurst, as her subsequent actions would demonstrate, was not finished. In the morning she announced an idea.
“Less Travelled” (2019)
Two years later Hurst published her account of their walk along the GR34, the coastal path that encircles Brittany like a rosary. The book, titled Less Travelled, transformed their squalid collapse into something else. She renamed herself Anne (more English), him Matthieu (more French). The book explained how the intransigence of the restaurant landlord bought on their failure. The writers’ retreat vanished almost entirely, written away as an afterthought. The book instead focused on their poverty and the need to walk and through walking, through the pain and hunger, find a way forward in their lives together.
The publisher, Indicule Editions, wasn’t major, but possessed good taste and better marketing instincts. Indicule commissioned an elegant woodcut-style cover and targeted their sales effort on a handful of key bookstores and ensuring certain journalists were supplied with elegant proof copies. Reviews began to flow and praised her “deft writing about feelings” (Western Press) and “masterly characterisation of the countryside” (Daily Express), as well as the “clarity of her prose” and the “generosity of her spirit towards her cynical husband” (Sunday Times). Small literary prizes followed. Both Angel and Matthias eagerly gave video and telephone interviews to the British press, who seemed entranced by their tale of fortitude and healing in the face of financial disaster. Money began to flow with the measured persistence of an IV drip.
The paperback edition featured endorsements from Richard and Judy, several national newspapers. Hurst and Brossard acquired an apartment overlooking the Brittany coast. Matthias learned photography, managed her social media presence, and became her devoted assistant. Sometimes she observed him staring at nothing with an expression she could not decipher; the look, perhaps, of a man watching his own life being rewritten by someone else.
The Sequel Period (2020-2022)
The second volume covered their walk from Saint Nazaire to Saint Malo illustrated with Matthias’s photographs of the coast, the wandering paths, the lonely copses where they had sheltered. Angel included more history of their time with long passages describing the destruction of both town during wartime and in between, long dives in the deep myth of Arthur’s Broceliande and Brittany’s contested history and clashing identities. She also included more poetry; critics noted the pastoral tone, the extended meditations on Angel’s Irish roots and her Celtic connections to the craggy, rain-swept land.
They signed deluxe editions at Hatchards and Foyles. His smile for the cameras never quite reached his eyes any more (a detail noted by at least one perceptive journalist, though the observation was buried in paragraph fourteen of a lifestyle piece).
International translations followed: German, Italian, French (the irony of this last was lost on no one). Success made Hurst confident, decisive. She reopened the writing retreat, this time in a village perched over the rocky coast of Finistère. She hired a team to manage it for her. Matthias followed her plans without question, though she occasionally discovered him examining messages from his mother on his phone when he believed himself unobserved.
Film rights were optioned. Cate Blanchett expressed interest, then Kate Winslet, who began coaching sessions to master Hurst’s Bristol accent. There were meetings scheduled with “C/Kate’s people” (a phrase that appeared repeatedly in Hurst’s correspondence from this period, always underlined).
The Exposure (2023)
The American release succeeded beyond expectations. Oprah declared herself a fan. The writing retreat was booked six months in advance. In their new house (larger windows, better views of the sea) Hurst began work on the second sequel. She considered expanding into fiction, “maybe after a year or so.” The phrase appears in multiple diary entries from this period, always followed by the single word: “Options.”
The unravelling began with Francine Brossard’s letter to the local Breton newspaper. Why, she inquired, had she been erased from their account? Not merely the spare room she had provided, but the food, the clothing, the endless expeditions to Decathlon. And of course the money she gave them for a car to drive around the coast; because, of course, they hadn’t walked all the way. The restaurant owner joined in the growing scandal, with documentation: lowered rent, free decorating materials, his patience with their mounting arrears, his bafflement at their sudden departure without cleaning up. He seemed more annoyed at their rudeness than his literary transformation into a money-grabbing ogre.
Local fishermen were interviewed to confirm there is no kindly old man living in a cave outside Roscoff doling out oyster and seaweed soup. There is no château near Morlaix where a blustering German owner could show Brossard how to shoot a grouse. No bookstore near Vannes made chapbooks for Hurst’s poetry so they could buy croissants for breakfast.
As the controversy was picked up the British press, Hurst’s former flatmate in Swindon emerged with records of unpaid debts, several thousand pounds in rent and ignored bills, as well as court judgements issued in her absence.
And finally, Hurst’s mother from the wicker chair of the family home’s conservatory, confirmed her daughter, whose real name was Angelica Smythe-Hurst, has no Irish connection she can think of, and was a “terribly dreamy” child who had told “silly fibs” all her life and happily reported that her daughter has received support from an inheritance since she was eighteen.
Indicule maintained faith through the completion of Less Travelled 2: The Dark Wood. Retreat bookings declined. Journalists began asking different sorts of questions. The publisher’s calm letters urged patience, suggested avoiding panic. In the darkness of their bedroom, they lay side by side asking: what next, what next. When Angel reached for his hand, Matthias allowed her to take it, but his fingers remained limp in hers.
The Confession Period (2023-2024)
Over the next days, morning conversations became expeditions. “I don’t understand,” she said, reading online speculation about accusations and allegations. “Why I lied. Why I wrote what I dreamed, not what happened.”
“Do you regret the way we told it?” he asked.
“Yes. No. People need stories with foundations and blueprints. Certainties.” She had become an expert in the architecture of uncertainty. “We never wanted to deceive anyone.”
“But we wanted to survive.”
“I didn’t think that what I didn’t say would be so important.”
“It was a dream.”
“Even in a dream we have to believe we are pure, good.”
“We had to live.”
“All the book is about is… well, redemption. Everyone loves redemption stories. And I had to show we deserved it. Everyone wants to read about redemption because nobody can live if it isn’t real.”
Matthias does not think of the bed, the sea view, the new 4×4 parked out front, the new darkroom he is building, the warning messages his mother has been sending for months. For the first time he thinks of the void he has teetered over his entire life and the stupidity of the decision to step into it.
Victor Bly/Frère Henry (Chicago, 1965-?)
The meditation retreat near Chamonix was Hurst’s final gambit (or perhaps her first honest one). Frère Henry, the relationship guru and Tiktok sensation with his American accent and rhyming couplets about distance, love, and the purity of the body, presided over thirty cross-legged seekers in yoga pants. The picture windows overlooked bright blue skies and alpine peaks. If she squinted, Angel could see eagles.
Frère Henry, wearing beige linen robes, sat at the centre of a circle of devotees in the sunshine of the great chapel-chalet and talked about love as tension, honesty and a system of belief. Like all great human endeavours love is riven by doubt and doubt, he said, was not the enemy of love but its proof. A thing without doubt was a thing without stakes. He let the silence hold. The seekers leaned in. Angel watched a bead of sweat track down the neck of the woman in front of her and thought about how easily certainty could be sold to people who had paid to feel uncertain together.
After a week of spinach, goat cheese, and hard mountain bread, Hurst approached him privately. “All this talk of honesty,” she began. “I have been dishonest. I have lied and dissembled. I have forgotten deliberately.”
They sat outside in one of the rolling green meadows surrounding the retreat. The air was thin, clear.
Slowly, he nodded. She continued:
“And yet you lie also. You are Victor Bly, born in Chicago. You wrote a bestselling memoir about running away from your abusive father and roaming Europe. Gypsies, refugees, cocaine in the Bundestag, orgies with Spanish princesses. You claimed you were raped by a priest in Marseilles and then yourself violated a woman in Stockholm. CNN, Hollywood, book tours and magazine covers. And it was all lies. You were found out and the whole world ganged up on you. Then you became Frère Henry.”
He smiled.
She continued as if reading an autopsy report: “Now you have millions of followers on social media. They watch your yoga and relationship advice. They listen to your tantric chanting. They take notes when you say Covid is a hoax. That the Chinese aim to enslave Europe through Arab proxy invasion. You say all our food is poisoned by hostile pharmaceutical firms to make us servile and credulous. This is all proven to be lies. You are a liar who can’t stop lying.”
Beatifically, he nodded.
“When I was Victor, people wanted to believe me. They were disappointed. It broke what they thought of the world. Their constructed image of the way things work. My story was one brick in that. It compromised the whole structure when they thought themselves deceived over one brick.”
“They were.”
He smiled. “You see, all stories are true. All conspiracies. All fabrications. The trick is to make people care. But not care yourself. All that matters is how you got here and where you go next.”
The conversation, recorded by Hurst in her final notes, represents perhaps the only documented instance of two professional fabricators achieving complete philosophical alignment. Bly/Henry and Hurst seemed to find an agreement: that in an age of infinite information, the distinction between truth and fiction becomes not a moral question but a marketing one.
In her notes Angel writes an afterthought: “Or maybe it’s all bullshit.”
Epilogue: The Final Walk (2024-?)
The third volume, Two Roads, chronicled their diagonal crossing of France from Brittany (”the edge of the world”) to the Alps (”the true heart of Europe”). The account abandoned all pretence of romance. Their arguments were recorded verbatim, their bodily functions documented with fidelity, Matthias’s hatred of his countrymen and Hurst’s jealousies laid bare like specimens on a laboratory table. Sex was described with intimate detail, mapping both their shortcomings as well as Hursts intricate jumbled post coital thoughts about their troubled partnership.
Reviewers noted the heady mix of disarming emotional honesty, dry history and extended poetry that read like Ezra Pound rewriting Wordsworth: precise, imagistic fragments arranged into pastoral meditations. Both TLS and n+1 recognised her considerable strengths as a poet. In Angers, she devoted equal space to the majestic beauty of the Apocalypse Tapestry, a long elegy on the view from the Cathedral and then a blow-by-blow account of a screaming argument that ended with Matthias departing by train for Paris. He returned a week later. They resumed walking.
The book ends in the Alps as they begin the climb to Bly’s chalet complex. Her relationship with Brossard was as broken and jagged as the mountains and they hoped they would find peace and a future up in the “savage blue peaks”. For unknown reasons she excised the conversation with Bly from the manuscript.
Hurst emailed the manuscript and a huge file of notes from an internet café in Chamonix. The long accompanying letter indicated that no more communication would be forthcoming, the couple would not be supporting the launch and they trusted Indicule’s decisions in their interest. The book, of course, went on to become a worldwide bestseller, with extensive articles in The Atlantic and NYT and intensive discussion in several Reddits.
Kate Winslet departed the film project. An actress from EastEnders (a soap opera Hurst remembered as “grey and shouty”) expressed strong interest. Neither Angel nor Matthias cared any more. They had learned, perhaps too late, that some forms of honesty are indistinguishable from suicide.
According to the Daily Telegraph, the last confirmed sighting places them in a village near Chambéry in spring of 2025. Local reports suggest they departed together, walking south towards Italy, carrying heavy packs and with the determined gait of people who had a destination. Whether this represents their final disappearance or merely their latest reinvention remains a matter of speculation.
A Note on Sources
This account is compiled from publicly available documents, interviews with former associates, Angel’s notes for volume 3 and the subjects’ own published works. Where dialogue appears, it has been reconstructed, though readers should remember that both Hurst and Brossard proved, by their own admission, unreliable narrators of their own lives. The boundaries between documentation and fabrication, like the boundaries of Brittany itself, shift depending on who is drawing the map.