So suck it up, LW. You did what you did. Instead of letting it destroy her she took her pain and turned it into a survival guide that is helping others feel less alone. Yes, some folks probably know it's about you. You'll have to suck that up too. I'm pretty sure that's what you're mostly worried about, or you would have been around with your apologies a long time ago.
I don't completely agree with Anne Lamott, though if I had something I truly wanted to write and publish, I would rely on her statement to give me courage. But the truth is that no one can behave well enough to save them from the fate of looking bad in someone's novel! The novelist might be a victim, but I think most novelists are not victims. They are observers, often highly judgmental, and they're inclined to develop their raw material into the most interesting and amusing and agonizing form, not to treat everyone fairly. Yes, you "own" the raw material you gathered from others, and no one can stop you from applying the brutal force of your creativity to what you've got there, but don't imagine that these people deserve it all because they weren't good enough!
That said, the letter writer in that WaPo column sounds perfectly awful, and I'm willing to believe that he deserved it. You know, he owns what happened to him, including the fate of becoming somebody else's fictional character. He's free to justify himself to the hilt and destroy the first wife by whipping up his own novel. Maybe she should have "behaved better." But I'm thinking it would probably be a better novel if he dragged himself through the mud.
ADDED: I hope WaPo made sure the letter was really from the ex-husband of the novelist. It makes him look so bad that I'm imagining one of his enemies sending that letter in as a way to draw attention to the book and lock him into the interpretation that the character in the book is really him.
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Hell hath no fury...
Each actor is responsible for his or her actions. If you treat another badly, then that is on YOU, no matter how much you might justify it because the other is awful too.
I don't know what the novel is, but I'd like to know.
'I don't know what the novel is, but I'd like to know.'
It's titled, 'My ex-husband is a lying, cheating, asshole prick and I hope he burns in hell along with his whore and bastard kid.'
Kind of long, I know, but the publisher thought it was catchy...
Good behavior is no protection, though. You could be resolutely supportive and warm, and still be made out as a villain if that's what the book demands. When someone writes a book that appears to be about the author's own life, an outsider has no way of knowing how much is true and how much is fiction. If this guy's acquaintances try to dig at him about his ex-wife's book, his best approach would simply be to say, "she's a talented novelist," and leave it at that.
It's called forgiveness, not pastgiveness, right?
Reading the WP column brings a lot more sense to this situation. So basically this guy cheated on his wife and they divorced. Now she is still resentful. End of story.
Welcome to the world of divorce. It's a nasty thing. Ex-spouses stay resentful for a LONG time. Back when I was practicing law, I much preferred my criminal defendant clients to any domestic cases -- they were a lot nicer and more honest than the viciousness you saw between two spouses breaking up.
That resentment and anger goes on for years and years and years.
And, yes, that is the choice of the person who harbors the resentment. At some point, they need to let go, otherwise they become the hate.
One thing I have noticed about some women is that they want the ability to express their emotions and they also want to control how people around them react to their emotions.
And they get mad when people do not react to their expressed emotions in the way they want.
As if it is other people's fault.
The Rewrite (2014) cinema class instructor Hugh Grant, criticizing a script about him by a girl that he'd broken off with, points out that you can't have a character start bad and end bad, i.e. be just bad all the way through. It needs a narrative.
Guerilla marketing.
wasn't nora ephrons heartburn about that,
If someone writes a scathing article about me in WaPo, does it matter in any way shape or form?
Hmm, maybe the Woke-nazis will come after you, facts be damned.
He's free to justify himself to the hilt and destroy the first wife by whipping up his own novel. Maybe she should have "behaved better." But I'm thinking it would probably be a better novel if he dragged himself through the mud.
But of course! No woman must be made to feel bad about, or responsible for, anything, ever.
All the pain of loss- doubled by infidelity.
I cannot see that the vilification of my ex(phhhth phhhthht) would ever warm the raw emptiness that miscarriage and rejection would leave. That f/ker would have left eventually (trust me). Why, oh why throw the baby out w/the bath water??
He should consult the reactions and fates of other unwitting people who got involved with writers and found out they had been reduced to a character - even a caricature.
Talleyrand had the best response. After his affair with Germaine de Stael - a lady noted for her strongly masculine appearance - she wrote a novel called Delphine, about a beautiful intelligent generous kindly lady (naturally, based on Germaine's view of herself) and the crafty, dissembling Madame de Vernon, who conceals her ruthless self-interest behind a facade of good manners. That was Talleyrand. When twitted about it, Talleyrand replied, "I have heard that in her novel, Mme. de Stael depicted us both disguised as women."
I wracked my head trying to remember if she was the Baltimore lady or the vampire lady.
Anne Rice died last week at 80. Ann Tyler is still around at 80.
Anne Lamott? Nothing comes to mind ...
Having an affair and leaving your wife is worse than your wife trashing you in her novel.
Interviewer: Do you ever feel that you have exploited relationships by writing about them?
Leonard Cohen: That's the very least way in which I have exploited relationships. If that was the only way I'd exploited a relationship then I'm going straight to heaven. Are you kidding me?
Q magazine, 1991
LOL. That's what novelist do. Every girlfriend of Charles Bukowski complained he made them look bad in his novels. Hemingway created a fictional character of his 3rd wife and described her as having "the ambition of Napoleon and the talent of a HS Valdictorian".
"no one can behave well enough to save them from the fate of looking bad in someone's novel!"
True. Particularly a woman's novel featuring her ex.
Gentlemen! Let his be a lesson to you! Remember the hot-crazy matrix. Now add a third dimension. Make it the hot-crazy-writer matrix. Act accordingly.
I recall somebody--it was years ago--who said you can't write anything without selling somebod out. And she began the piece talking about her journalism career. She'd done something about a bit of a fuss in the fashion industry and the model she'd named--not actually involved with the contertan--never worked again.
She said the same was true of fiction. Although I know of some short stories whose victim of sell-out appears to have been the author having done or not done something.
But SOMETHING has to be BAD for there to be narrative tension and who's that going to be?
“I was quite surprised, because she’s a technical writer and never expressed interest in fiction.”
His principal complaint seems to be that he wasn’t fairly on notice that she might use him as fodder for a fiction novel. It follows that anyone who marries a fiction writer would be on notice.
I'd assume that the guy's own story would involve no sex and lots of nagging from his then-wife leading to an affair with a (for now) more appreciative woman.
I believe the book is "Dusk, Night, Dawn: On Revival and Courage" (2021). Ms. Lamott married for the first time when she was 66 years old. She does have a martyr side to her life and is prone to flights of self-indulgence. Her books sell well. My HO.
Hemingway created a fictional character of his 3rd wife and described her as having "the ambition of Napoleon and the talent of a HS Valdictorian".
Hemingway was notorious for that sort of thing. I always figured that The Sun Also Rises was written by a man wanting a divorce, thwarted romance and all. And Hadley gave him one the next year and walked away. Smart woman.
It is not even original. In “Something’s Gotta Give”, Jack Nicholson’s character (Harry) leaves Diane Keaton’s character (Erica). Erica is a successful playwright, and her next production is a complete takedown of Harry.
"One thing I have noticed about some women is that they want the ability to express their emotions and they also want to control how people around them react to their emotions."
There are plenty of male novelists.
"But of course! No woman must be made to feel bad about, or responsible for, anything, ever."
Have you ever read novels written by men? They are often about women. Try "Anna Karenina," "Madame Bovary," and "I Married a Communist."
Have you ever read novels written by men?
Now do Harlequinn Romance and the rest of the bodice rippers.
Male authors go easier on women then vice-versa, because women buy 80% of all fiction.
""But of course! No woman must be made to feel bad about, or responsible for, anything, ever."
Have you ever read novels written by men? They are often about women."
True, but Tolstoy and Flaubert don't refute what I take to be a statement about modern culture, do they?
Anyway, here's a parlor game for lit fans around here: how do the best men's novels about women compare with the best women's novels about men? (This does not assume that women's novels about men are any good.) Or: who are the female writers' closest male approximations of Anna, Emma, and the rest?
A man cheated on his wife, left her when the girlfriend got pregnant, and regrets it while explaining that he "needed to feel something other than grief and sadness" after the first wife had a late-term miscarriage.
That sounds a little like the Jeffrey Toobin story. It doesn't really pick up until he gets a grip and takes himself in hand ...
At this point, is there any reason remaining for any writer to write about a couple going through divorce, (whether based on the author's experience or not), or for a publisher to publish it? Unless one can use the premise as merely the starting premise for something else, something more ambitious or phantasmagorical, why flog yet another dreary tale of a couple coming apart?
So, friendship with "benefits", and a child who is his and her choice and their credit.
However, leaving his first "friend" after Her Choice precluded her choice, and in her sorrow, perhaps torment, which he apparently did not share, she could not reciprocate to his demand for shared "benefits". Moron-o.
Who wants to read about happy people being nice to each other?
By the purest coincidence, last night I finished (re)reading Caroline Graham's Written In Blood, one of whose subplots involves a novelist listening intently and sympathetically to an acquaintance's gut-wrenching life story, then appropriating it entire for his own first novel. Because, the novelist explains, the guy really wasn't up to writing it himself. It's not actually the proximate cause of the tormented man's death, but it does factor in.
As a general rule, I detest that sort of thing. Whoever came up with "Write what you know" has caused a lot of people a lot of grief.
Anne Lamott also said in a radio interview something like you can make your ex horrible and describe him down to every detail in your novel, but give the character a small penis and he'll never react to the portrayal because he won't want people to believe the small penis thing.
I watched Kramer vs Kramer on the big screen and was glad never to have read a single word of it beforehand, except that doing so would have saved me from watching it on screen, and on a date, no less, thus becoming the third worst date movie I've ever experienced. Painful relationships are painful to watch, to read, to experience.
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