Tara Gilesbie was the author of My Immortal, although the first 15 chapters were edited by Raven.
Little information was known about Tara aside from what she mentioned in her author's notes and what she posted on other websites (although most of those accounts are not believed to be accurate).
History
2006 - 2007
As stated, Tara Gilesbie wrote My Immortal under the profile name XXXbloodyrists666XXX on fanfiction.net. Like any young writer, she shares many of the same traits of the primary "protagonist" of her story, Ebony (also known as Enoby, Ebomby, Evony, Ibiny, Ebpony, Eboby or Enony), but excluding the vampirism and magical powers. But she still labels and distinguishes herself as a "goff", wrist cutter, Satanist, lover of Hot Topic and various mainstream punk/emo/goth/alternative genre bands, etc.
Tara is supposedly from Dubai, a principality part of the United Arab Emirates (another fact about Tara that raises giant question marks). However when digging further it was discovered that both she and her friend/editor were from Connecticut (listed as being from New Haven Connecticut) through their combined myspace page. Before writing My Immortal, she also shared that the band Good Charlotte made a great impact on her life. Apparently, their song entitled "Hold On" convinced her not to commit suicide after a recent breakup from her boyfriend Crys.
She began writing My Immortal circa 2006. She updated the story on a regular basis. But there were often large gaps between updates as she claimed that the flames of the reviewers caused her to "slit muh rists" and she had to go to the hospital for recovery. There were other moments when she went on extended vacations or was just too "bizzy". She made one last update in mid-2007 before going on a trip to England. She never made any further updates to My Immortal, leading her baffled readers to reach the logical conclusion that she had shed her overexaggerated gothic persona. However, Youtube videos from their channel, uploaded mid 2009, showed that this wasn't the case.
2017
On August 2, 2017, a FictionPress account apparently belonging to Tara was updated. Updates from that account are transcribed below:
Update: 8/2/17
- "I guess nobody remembered that I was on FictionPress, too.
So, hi. I'm the girl you all knew as Tara. My FF.net account really was hacked (twice!), once in 2006 and again in 2009. As of 2017, Support still doesn't answer my requests to regain it, although I can't say I blame them. They're probably scared I'll flood their site with poorly written sex scenes again.
I'm lucky the hackers never migrated to this account, considering it had the exact same login credentials. (They've since been changed, don't worry.)
I'll let the account's creation date speak as to whether it's legitimate or not.
Thank you all so, so much for keeping My Immortal alive over the years. You fill my heart with so much love. (Preppy moment, oops.)
That's about all I have to say for now."
Update: 8/27/17
- "Because I've received several messages asking this, and predict I may receive more, I'll answer it here. No, I am not Lani Sarem. Really bad fiction simply tends to read the same. No, I'm not on Facebook. Or Deviantart. Or MySpace. Or Youtube. (Etc.) I am on Tumblr. But I use my real name there, and it's not Tara."
Final Update: 8/31/17
- "This is going to be my final update. I'm getting way too many PMs to answer them all individually. A lot of people are asking why I waited until this month to say anything, so I'll try to address that.
I registered for FanFiction.net on February 28th, 2006. Yes, I know the profile says March 1st. The profile is wrong. It was February 28th, because my best friend had just turned fifteen. I'm not likely to forget her birthday. (For anyone wondering, My Immortal was uploaded on March 3rd.) I registered for FictionPress on March 31. I never uploaded anything on FP, which is probably why hackers never got around to hijacking it: They didn't know it existed. Unfortunately, I forgot it existed, too. I only remembered this site a few weeks ago when I was talking with my agent and my editor about My Immortal's weird internet legacy.
I signed into FP after so long for three reasons. The first is the most obvious: My FF profile is no longer accessible. It was hacked almost a decade ago. I knew the girls who hacked us the first time--they were two girls from the Philippines with whom Raven and I were constantly fighting on the forums, and they were just trying to mess with us--but I don't know who did it the final time, although I have my suspicions. FF.net seems to be a body without a head right now, because staff doesn't answer any of my emails. They didn't answer emails a decade ago, either. If you know how to get in contact with Xing Li, let me know. I can easily prove I'm who I say I am if he'll give me the time of day. The second reason for logging into this dusty old account: I wanted to leave a thank you note to My Immortal's readers. Really. That's it. Because I really am beyond grateful that you've kept it alive for so long, even without me. And the third reason I updated, and possibly the silliest: Ugh...Lani Sarem. I am a massive fan of The Hate U Give, which I consider an incredibly important literary work. Sarem trying to scam it out of its spot on the NYT literary list left me feeling sick to my stomach. When I received a couple of messages here asking me if I was Sarem, even though they were probably in jest, I felt a kneejerk reaction to shoot them down. Authors work really fricking hard to get their stories told. Sarem breezing through the process wasn't just an insult to Angie Thomas and the political climate that necessitated her work. It was an insult to the kind women I'm privileged to work with.
So, that's it. It doesn't seem like there's anything more I can say on the topic. Not right now.
Love one another and help one another. We can't navigate this world without each other.
P.S. - Undyne is my wife, HAHAHA, SUCK IT HATERS."
On September 1, a user on My Immortal Wiki called Fokenprepz updated their profile stating they are Tara and they will not respond to messages posted here. The accoumt previously posted a comment on August 3 linking the FictionPress account.
This account was later revealed to belong to Theresa Christoduolopoulos (commonly referred to as Rose Christo) who claimed to have written My Immortal in an attempt to find her brother, who she claimed she was separated from by the foster care system, and revealed she was writing memoirs about the events. However, in the comments of a forum post created on September 5, and in a subsequent forum post , a user who was later confirmed to be her brother revealed that she had lied about many things in her story, including them being in foster care. On October 3 it was revealed that her memoirs were cancelled by the publisher due to failing a fact check. These events lead many to believe she is not actually Tara.
Writing Style
As any reader/reviewer of My Immortal would tell you, Tara Gilesbie possesses a very distinct writing style, much of which probably reflects her personality. For instance, she has a habit of writing as if she were sending text messages (it gets so bad that it gets increasingly harder for the reader to decipher her words as the story continues). She also bombards the chapters with a series of author's notes, all of which tell the "prepz and posr[s]" to stop flaming her work. Or some would be in direct response to particular criticisms she received from reviewers about her spelling, OOC (out of character) characters, etc. She would also usually threaten to slit her wrists for each bad review or threaten to not update the fanfic unless she got a certain number of good reviews. An example of which includes:
"AN: STOP flaming! if u flam it menz ur a prep or a posr! Da only reson Dumbledeor swor is coz he had a hedache ok an on tup of dat he wuz mad at dem 4 having sexx! PS im nut updating umtil I get five good revoiws!"
As mentioned, her writing is very distinctive to her personality. She is under the mindset that the world is separated into three groups: Preps (people like Hilary Duff, the color pink, everything and everyone Tara dislikes and tells to 'fuk off'), posers (people like Avril Lavigne, the character Albert Dumblydore, or basically people who try to be goth) and finally goths. She also goes into great length of describing her characters' clothes for several paragraphs (in My Immortal's defense, these in-depth descriptions are probably the only thing written somewhat coherently). She also has no problem of constantly reminding her readers of her love for various bands such as My Chemical Romance, Good Charlotte and/or Evanescence. But what's most distinctive, is Tara's fondness for ignoring canon. To put it simply, she takes some of the more primary characters from the Harry Potter series and turns them into almost always bisexual vampire-goths who constantly wear black, worship Satan, are depressed, suicidal, and gives them a house change into Slytherin.
One more side note of Tara's writing style is her habit of experimenting with the English language and other languages as well (Japanese). Although she overtly states that she has an interest in Japanese (she has many characters spouting random Japanese phrases in the story such as "kawaii"), Tara, unfortunately, proves that she has grasped very little of both languages. She loves to experiment with adverbs in particular. Some of which include "sexily", "suicidally" and "gothically" (although in Tara's defense, all of these words are in fact actual adverbs of sex, suicide and goth), but these adverbs are frequently misspelled. She also inexplicably changes the spelling of some peoples' names and changes their personalities frequently.
However, it can be inferred that either she or Raven has read The Fellowship of the Ring due to the name "Tom Satan Bombodil", which could be a twisted and misspelled version of "Tom Bombadil", from The Lord of the Rings trilogy.
Troll Controversy
One of the world's most frequently asked questions and greatest mysteries: Is Tara Gilesbie trolling? This would make the greatest sense for the explanation of My Immortal because as many would say, "My Immortal is just too bad to be true!". However, many other things would have to be taken into account if Tara Gilesbie was in fact just a young, teenage fan-girl who was given access to the internet.
First, to support the troll theory, one must look at Tara's origins. She supposedly lives (or lived) in Dubai. As previously stated, Dubai is an emirate of the United Arab Emirates. Tara also loves Hot Topic. So unless she or her friends or family are fabulously wealthy, it would be nearly impossible for her to take weekly trips to the States or any other country that has a Hot Topic so she could purchase her goods. Additionally, the United Arab Emirates is a predominantly Muslim nation[1][2][3], and is located in the Middle East, where such attitudes towards Satanism, witchcraft, etc. are seen as acts of blasphemy. In addition, discrediting the theory that she actually lives in Dubai even further, she says in an author's note: "...oh yah btw ill be in vacation in transilvania 4 da nex 3 dayz so dnot expect updatz." In another author's note, she describes how "transilvania rox hrad". She says that she got to see the castle where 'Dracula' was filmed. However, 'Dracula', though set in Transylvania and England, was filmed only in England and California, USA. In addition, she once referred to
"omfg im leeving dubya pretty soon kant wait!!!"
However, all of this can be misleading. When Tara says "dubya" she could be referring to two things. The word dubya is in fact a slang term for the Southern American pronunciation of the letter "W". It is also used to flame and mock former United States president, George W. Bush, by pronouncing his middle initial as "dubya". Dubya also refers to an American organization called Dubya USA. It is based in California and it sells various motocross and wheeling goods. What makes all of this mysterious is that Tara may have misspelled Dubai as "dubya" or she could be implying that she is in fact an American. Or, obviously, if she is not a troll, she's living in Connecticut but pretends to live in Dubai.
Furthermore, My Immortal itself, for a lack of a better explanation, does too many things wrong to be written completely seriously. It reads like a list of things a troll writer would do: frequently misspell words in an almost organized manner, text chatting, random/unexplained sex scenes, etc.
On the other hand, to negate the troll theory, one must take into the account of the many things that are a part of My Immortal. The trolling author would have to create the personality of Tara Gilesbie, manage her many accounts (she has had other accounts besides the one that is now deleted from fanfiction.net), and her password(s), and not to mention take the time and dedication to write the forty-four long chapter story itself.
Besides Tara Gilesbie, the troll author would also have to remember the persona of Raven, Tara Gilesbie's friend. As in Tara's case, the troll would have to manage Raven's account(s), password(s), and write her stories, unless there was a second troll involved. Raven's stories would have to coincide with Tara's stories, because they had a falling out. Both writers have chapters in their fan fictions in which they both wrote (or killed) off the avatars in their stories based off the other writer's personalities and vice-versa.
This would be a lot, even for a troll. And if Tara was a troll, she could easily be a very determined and persistent troll to manage those two accounts. Or it could have been a well organized group of people who decided to put My Immortal together. The possibilities are endless.
For unknown reasons, many people have come forward and claimed themselves to have written and/or co-written My Immortal. Some have taken it further by stating that they are or created the persona of Tara Gilesbie and admitted that they were trolling and writing the stories for laughs. Some have even gone to disturbingly great extremes to claim that they not only were Tara, but were continuing the legacy of My Immortal by writing new stories similar to the fashion of the original story by posting such stories on fanfiction.net (although some have subsequently been deleted). Whether these people are lying or telling the truth is another mystery, because anyone could have easily created an account and claimed My Immortal as their own. The fact that some of these people have decided to come forward after all these years between now and 2007 is suspicious enough, but it is all up for debate and up to the reader/reviewer to determine the authenticity of the story in their own mind. This is what makes My Immortal one of the most mysterious pieces of work the internet has ever seen.
Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen
It has often been speculated that Tara was also also the author of the notorious badfic Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen. This Twilight fanfiction, notable as one of the few works that makes the original series look well written, was published by an author going by the name of BeckyMack666. Her full profile shows a very similar array of tastes to Tara, including a love of MCR. Furthermore, an close analysis of the text reveals a great deal of similarities with My Immortal. Both feature female OC gothic vampires with absurdly long names; compare Ebony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Way with Atlantiana Rebekah Loren, who both cry tears of blood and wear gothic clothing described in ridiculous amounts of detail. Unusual euphemisms are used to describe the male genitalia, like "man-carrot" and "throbbing lavender man-fruit thing" which appear very similar to the original "boy's thingy" and the complex conflict between goths and preps is explored. Most damningly, a specific line of Forbidden Fruit seems to be directly referencing Tara's original work, in Chapter 7 a highly out-of-character Bella Swan storms in on the protagonist and Edward Callan screaming "WHAT DO YOU THINK YOUR DOING YOU EVIL RODENT PEOPLE?!!!!!", followed by "It was Bella Swan!!"
There is therefore a case to be made that both works share the same author, especially since Tara had indeed stated that she had moved onto the Twilight fandom. However it is also highly possible that Forbiden Fruit is the work of a troll heavily inspired by My Immortal, or that it is simply by coincidence that the two works resemble each other so much.
Indeed, both works differ radically in two main aspects in the presentation of the main character, tone and language. Tara's writting essentially depicts Ebony as a self-important character that does whatever she likes, while BeckyMack666 writes Atlantiana as more of a self-justifying character, constantly and consistently trying to make herself the "good guy" (regardless of her actual behaviour). Likewise, Tara depicts sex in an IKEA-like manner, while BeckyMack666 gets a lot more graphic, and lets her character be raped to score pity points, something Tara would never do. Finally, although both stories are extremely random, Forbiden Fruit is more willing to be extravagant, creating such characters as Snooflanti the talking panda, when nothing of the sort is seen in My Immortal.