Billy McFarland

Billy McFarland reportedly writing a Fyre Festival memoir from prison

Two documentaries, countless think-pieces and memes later, if you still can’t get enough of the disastrous Fyre Festival (which happened just over two years ago), you’re not alone. Now on the horizon appears a new tell-all about the failed festival, and this time it comes right from the horse’s mouth. Fyre founder Billy McFarland is reportedly working on a memoir, tentatively titled Promythus: The God of Fyre, telling the “raw” story of the festival. New York Magazine spoke with Josh Raab, a freelance editor who has worked on books from Al Gore and Garth Brooks, among others, about McFarland, who Raab was in talks to work on the project with.

From New York Magazine:

Handwritten letters, Eremenko [Anastasia Eremenko, McFarland’s girlfriend] told Raab, is how McFarland has been delivering pages of Promythus. He writes the pages in longhand and mails them to Eremenko to type.

Eremenko and Raab, in initial emails and phone calls, discussed a few details about the book project. McFarland, through Eremenko, said it would be about 800 handwritten pages worth of text when he was done writing.

The book, McFarland said, chronicles his career from the first investment in a now-shuttered start-up back in 2011 to the FBI paying him a visit days after the festival imploded. Rubinshtein [Brandon Rubinshtein, publicist with Dog Shit Media] provided Raab with a bullet-pointed, name-dropping list of selected stories, the sorts of “great and terrible moments” McFarland planned to highlight. Actors, models, musicians, people who are only famous because their parents are, cameos from members of the Trump administration, the list goes on and on. Much of McFarland’s plan centers around telling what he calls the “raw” story, the story he feels that the Hulu and Netflix documentaries — both released in January 2019 — failed to fully depict.

McFarland told Raab he was inspired by Jordan Belfort’s memoir and subsequent film adaptation The Wolf of Wall Street, and that he hoped to use profits from the sales of his memoir to pay the $26 million in restitution he owes, and to repay Bahamians, vendors, and ticket-holders effected by the festival.

McFarland had planned for the self-published memoir to be available on Amazon by late April, but it has yet to materialize, and Raab eventually decided not to take on the project, although he told New York Magazine that Rubinshtein has continued to contact him about it, including discussing plans for Andy King (who you may remember from Netflix’s Fyre documentary and his viral story about being asked to “take one for the team” to get water for the festival) to do its publicity.

Read the full interview with Raab on New York Magazine.