Never love a writer

A woman was floored when she opened the Sunday Times to discover her ex had written about their relationship and breakup,* revealing some of their most intimate details. (Not her name, though.) Of course, she may well turn around and write a revenge piece. But it seems to break some social taboo to write in an unflattering way about someone and not even warn them that the piece -- presented as nonfiction -- is coming out.
* Link courtesy Maud Newton.

Words are powerful and, with the advent of the Internet, more and more permanent (some email exchanges I had in the mid-90s are archived on websites, for example): I said something in passing about another writer's work more than ten years ago in a newsgroup -- something negative, I guess, but (I thought) trivial -- so trivial I didn't even remember making the comment. That person proceeded to cut me dead for years, to my complete mystification. Then years later, that person was asked by another writer what she thought of me, and her anger actually made it into this other person's book.

Not every sex radical likes loudmouthed rhetoricians like Mark. He's given to attacking others if he disagrees with their methods; when I mentioned him to ________, she shook her head and told me of his on-line diatribes against her. His indie sensibilities... combine with an elitist attitude that allows him to dismiss much of what's floating around out there in the marketplace. "There are some people who seem to be promoting themselves more than the issues they're talking about," he commented. He didn't seem to consider that he himself might seem a bit of an egotist, since he did start a magazine to publish his own opinions. **

Only after I read that -- more than four years after this woman had begun spurning me and perhaps six years after the alleged "online diatribe" -- did I form even the most remote memory of saying anything about this woman. In fact, I don't disapprove of her "methods" and I feel like I would remember composing "diatribes" (plural!) about someone. But who knows -- I'm an asshole sometimes; I'll own up to being an egotist and even "elitist." Maybe I did say something negative; in those days, the mid-90s, you did feel like you could do anything on the internet with total anonymity and impunity. Or maybe it wasn't me, maybe somebody else posted something anonymously and she assumed it was me. I don't know, because I've never asked her about it. And ironically I can't find any evidence of any "diatribes" archived online. All I have is her continued scorn, and that book.

But back to the jilted woman and the NYT article in which she was pilloried. One can only imagine her shock. It's not like she was slagged in a newsgroup, or a book review, or even the Dick Cavett Show. She was ripped in the Sunday Styles section of the New York freakin' Times. Lackadaisical members of the bourgeoisie on four continents got to read about the most personal details of her former relationship over their Sunday coffee and croissants. An illustration accompanying the story depicted her -- let's use her words -- "as a grotesquely oversized, adultly breasted infant girl, arms and legs spread wide while a little boy frantically filed away at iron bars to make a prison break from a heart-shaped metal cage." Now that's some world-class bridge burning.

"I somehow knew my boyfriend would write about us," she says wanly. Well, you know what they say about falling in love with a writer. I've been reluctant to use real people in my work, with a couple of exceptions. In one story, in fact, I used what I thought were very clear emotional themes taken straight from a current relationship and put them into the title story in How I Adore You. But when I gave the story to the person I was having an affair with, she was mystified as to the connection between the story and us.

So I have a hard time doing it even when I try. And I'm glad of that, because there are very few people in the world I would want to crush in print, no matter how many, or how few, read it.
** from Weird Like Us by Ann Powers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000.