Billy McFarland, a.k.a. the Fyre Festival Guy, Has a Plan For His Comeback — So Brace Yourselves

Remember Billy McFarland, the fast-talking mastermind behind the ultimate millennial failure known as Fyre Festival? He’s working on a memoir about the unsuccessful venture — one he plans to self-publish from his prison cell, with the help of folks on the outside.

According to New York Magazine, a freelance editor named Josh Raab was cold-emailed by someone named “Ana,” and the correspondence caught his interest immediately.

“Last month 2 documentaries came out about the FYRE FESTIVAL but unfortunately both misrepresented the real events and Billy would like to share his story,” the email read. “In my experience, if you write back fast as possible, you get the job,” the editor told the outlet. “I saw it right when I woke up and I responded right away.”

Next came a phone call, where Ana explained McFarland was working on a memoir entitled Promythus: The God of Fyre and that he was going to self-publish the project in the spring. Ana turned out to be Anastasia Ermenko, McFarland’s model girlfriend, who made an appearance in the Hulu documentary about the festival called Fyre Fraud. She reportedly claims she didn’t know about his epic failure when they started dating, despite it being post-festival meltdown.

McFarland is reportedly so into Ana that he’s been sending her letter upon letter from the Federal Correctional Facility in Otisville, a medium-security prison in upstate New York where he is serving his six-year sentence for fraud — letters that include handwritten pages of his book for her to type up. Billy, through his girlfriend, told Josh the book would be about 800 handwritten pages when he was done writing.

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According to phone calls had with McFarland after the vetting process, the book would recount his career, dating back to the first investment in a now-defunct start-up back in 2011 to when the FBI came knocking on his door just days before the festival cracked and crumbled at his feet.

His motive in the memoir? According to the outlet, his reasons for taking pen to paper lie in his desire to tell what he considers the “raw” story, which he feels the Netflix and Hulu documentaries of January 2019 didn’t capture.

McFarland was sentenced in October 2018 and is scheduled for a 2024 release, being ordered to pay $26 million in restitution. He reportedly plans to use the profits from the book to offset those fines.