She’s on to the next chapter.
After rushing into nuptials with her now ex-wife, a woman realized the person she married was a fraud who pretended to have cancer — all thanks to a fictitious book.
At the time, Yaya Kampen didn’t know anything about the 2012 bestselling young adult novel “The Fault in Our Stars,” but it changed her life — “twice.” The heart-wrenching book, written by John Green, follows two teenage cancer patients who fall in love.
It wasn’t until the title was adapted into a blockbuster film in 2013, starring Shailene Woodley and Ansel Elgort, that Kampen became familiar with the storyline — and noticed her then-wife’s life bore eerie similarities to the characters.
“At the time, I was married to someone who was dying of terminal bone cancer. She had only a few months left to live,” Kampen revealed on TikTok in a video that has garnered more than 2 million views. “But as I’m watching the movie, I’m realizing that almost identical to the story plot is my wife’s life.”
She admitted the pair didn’t know each other “very long” prior to tying the knot — “because she was dying of cancer,” supposedly — but Kampen thought the odd coincidence was “just too close.”
So, she read the book in its entirety.
“Even the phrases that you used she would use daily,” she said in the stitched clip, addressing Green who was celebrating the novel’s 11th anniversary. “So it was your story that inspired her to fake terminal bone cancer, but it was also your movie from that story that gave me the first alarm bells to prove that she was lying to me about having terminal bone cancer.”
“Don’t worry, she’s still alive and well today, but I guess … thank you?” she ended the video.
Naturally, viewers were flabbergasted by the seemingly tall tale, expressing disbelief and shock in the comments.
“Nothing could have prepared me,” one user said of the story.
“Whyyy do I feel like she used the lit up like a Christmas tree line,” another wrote, referencing the line said by teen character Gus Waters, which Kampen confirmed was “spot on.”
“My jaw is on the floor,” a shocked user commented.
Even the official account for Penguin Books UK weighed in: “The way I clutched my nonexistent pearls.”
“You know, it’s been a hot minute since I’ve been THAT bamboozled by a TikTok. I was simply unprepared for the journey you brought us on,” someone else quipped.
“The way I just GASPED omg was not expecting that,” another agreed.
Kampen used the hashtags “#munchausensyndrome” and “#factitiousdisorder” in the caption, which read, “lol great story tho. really had me believing.”
Although unconfirmed if Kampen’s wife was diagnosed with it, factitious disorder, also known as Munchausen Syndrome, is a psychological condition in which the afflicted person purposefully acts as if they’re sick or gets injured or ill in order to deceive others.