There are many people, myself included, who have been using em-dashes a lot since forever. I wouldn’t consider it a “definite flag”, the letter itself feels authentic.

She could well have written in third person. She was watching herself dying slowly, separating further and further from her life. If it felt like I was already dead towards the end, I might just run with it when writing my life story. Just leave a few fill-in-the-blanks for details like the date and ceremony details for hubby to fill in.

The title is close enough. Censored, missed a comma and skipped the secondary title. Very human choices and mistakes. Not sure why we'd expect a dying loving woman to be hyper focused on getting the title of her book right.

> Most tellingly, a suspicious emdash after Chipotle is a definite flag.

Good writers have been using em dashes for years -- that's why AIs keep using them. :)

Also, MS Word auto-corrects <space>-<space> into an em-dash just like it fixes quotes. Depending on which software was used to write it, it's very likely that's what happened.

I'm never suspicious of only one em-dash, as they are a perfectly valid, if infrequent punctuation. Three or more in an article this length would make start looking at the rest of it more closely, though.

> (Would an author really write "Check it out, it’s called “F Off Cancer” by Linda Brossi Murphy"? That's not even the title of the book!)

Perhaps there is some moderation happening on the blog.

Maybe she liked to use AI.

truth. Knew her and loved her. This was Linda. Mind you ALS is a long brutal disease. She wrote this. I’ll swear to it. Zero AI. The chipotle thing? Couldn’t be more true. You are dead wrong. Sorry.

Did she really write a book called "Fuck off, Cancer", only to then go around describing the book as “F Off Cancer, by Linda Brossi Murphy"? I don't think a published author would step back from her own boldness that way, or awkwardly insert her own name like this. This is the hand of someone else, a less skilled writer.