My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer

December 6, 2022 2:05 AM

A few days before he ended things the second time, we had a fight about my writing and ethics, specifically the question of whether I would write about our hypothetical future child.
posted by folklore724 (98 comments total)

Sounds like she's well rid of that asshole. He was "supportive" up until the moment he grew concerned that something she did or achieved might theoretically affect him in some way that could injure his pride. Bleah.

Incidentally, Isabel Kaplan's novel "NSFW" is pretty good. I'd recommend it.
posted by kyrademon at 2:41 AM on December 6, 2022 [14 favorites]

The ability to bend an inch at a time while seeming to stand up straight is a useful and gendered skill. Most women I know do it regularly. They bend until they’re pretzeled and then blame themselves for the body aches.

As a writer, I'm very aware that everything I experience ends up in my books, one way or another. I feel so lucky that my husband trusts me enough not to feel threatened by this.

I would hate to be in a relationship with someone who says they feel it's their responsibility to "take me down a peg" . Yikes!
posted by Zumbador at 3:01 AM on December 6, 2022 [39 favorites]

Nora said: you don’t get to have it both ways.

.....

In any relationship, there is an expectation of privacy. There is also an expectation of respect. Violate the latter and you relinquish your right to the former.

A powerful conclusion.

Also, I never knew the history she refers to, about Nora Ephron and Carl Bernstein.
posted by brainwane at 3:06 AM on December 6, 2022 [16 favorites]

That's a... pretty toxic conclusion. I mean, when I am broken up with and it hurts and the other person is mean about it, I don't feel free to be maximally hurtful in response. As I grow older, I think the best response is to not be hurtful at all. If it was at all an intimate relationship, we both have the goods on each other.

I don't know what I am supposed to make of it. Wow, she's doing her best to stick the knife in where it hurts him the most? He must have really hurt her. Wow, men are insecure and it's fucking exhausting? Yes, and yes. Here's some public drama for you to enjoy? Thank you, don't mind if I do. I'm going to go try and figure out who the guy is now.
posted by surlyben at 3:33 AM on December 6, 2022 [22 favorites]

It is not a healthy conclusion as a general rule. It also sounds like the author was in an abusive relationship, where different rules about what is a healthy response apply.
posted by eviemath at 4:04 AM on December 6, 2022 [19 favorites]

Or, like the internet quip, the crux of the matter here is what is meant by “respect”.
posted by eviemath at 4:06 AM on December 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

I think the genius in this piece is the way it hinges on Ephron. The boyfriend’s literary hero is Ephron, who is famous for her close observations of people around her and writing about them mercilessly, and then he chastises Kaplan for keeping a journal if he’s in it and breaks up with her because she might write about future children.

That’s egregious on so many levels. On a feminist level, on a writer level, etc. It’s also such a common “feminist guy” error, admiring all these capable women while kneecapping your own girlfriend. And as she comes out of the relationship she actually listens to Ephron through Ephron’s works. Ephron, as per this New Yorker piece, was all about turning your humiliations into power through narrative.

Then Kaplan basically…Nora Ephrons him (and herself) in the Guardian. It’s not particularly “nice,” but good for her.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:12 AM on December 6, 2022 [84 favorites]

This is like a more literary AITA.

And it elicits much the same response: fuck that guy.

While at the same time I'm thinking, huh, Paris and the Upper West Side? Must be nice.
posted by emjaybee at 4:51 AM on December 6, 2022 [21 favorites]

Yeah, there's some high SES going on here. A published novel in college? Two by 30? A big old Manhattan apartment? This is like a romcom screenplay's idea of the female lead's job. It doesn't make her wrong about this guy, though, and it certainly doesn't mean she doesn't deserve the praise for her work that she had coming.

Speaking of romcoms, it seems like I misjudged Nora Ephron. I thought her work was pretty fluffy, sort of like Erma Bombeck without the kids, but I guess I got that from Meg Ryan comedies. I should probably read her books.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:12 AM on December 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

against my better judgment I went on Twitter to look for the hot goss. I did not directly find the boyfriend's name, but someone did, and tweeted "Oh of course he edited the Crimson's Opinion page..." Brutal. And all I need to know, really.
posted by Countess Elena at 5:15 AM on December 6, 2022 [15 favorites]

First, fuck that guy. Sounds terrible.

In regards to this piece I think the key is where she talks about being trapped: if she writes about it, she comes off as vengeful, if she doesn’t then she’s essentially still letting this asshole dictate what she’s allowed to write about. There is no winning move, so go back to start: fuck that guy.
posted by dellsolace at 5:33 AM on December 6, 2022 [40 favorites]

Sure, slag on the loser ex, I agree he is a bad egg. But she reinforced and supported his thinking:

"I promised never to publish anything that he was uncomfortable with. I reminded him that I had never written about him because I knew he didn’t want me to – even during the years we weren’t together."

By her telling, she might still be with this asshat if he hadn’t finally taken his bruised baby ego and left.

I can't help but read this as an all too familiar story of a young female, despite being wealthy and well educated, who prioritizes having a heterosexual relationship and all its validation over her own self-respect and agency. Guess it might be outside the venue of this short piece, but the author doesn't really own her participation. I mean, did she think he was being reasonable? The journal stuff was beyond the pale. My bet is the sabotaging of her writing was just one part of his terrible behavior. The guy sounds like a manipulative and emotionally abusive person.

To me, the "but he was a fan of Nora Ephron!" didn't seem like the big disconnect she thought it was---I mean, I enjoy reading Hemingway quite a bit, but I wouldn’t want to date him…

I do remember Joyce Maynard getting a lot of criticism for writing a memoir about her affair with Salinger (when she 18, he was in his early 50s). I like to think now women have more freedom to own their experiences, and certainly deserve the space and respect to do so....But this piece still had a sad ex-girlfriend angst that made me feel she still cares way too much about what the asshole thinks.

And yeah, boo hoo, you are in the Upper West Side, not Brooklyn. Hard times, lady.
posted by rhonzo at 5:53 AM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Six Reasons to Stop Calling Women Females
posted by hydropsyche at 6:03 AM on December 6, 2022 [48 favorites]

The fact that the author wrote this essay and published it in The Guardian would seem to confirm the ex’s fears.
posted by interogative mood at 6:06 AM on December 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

All the things about the boyfriend being an ass are true, but it's also true that being a writer often involves being cruel to those you love for the sake of a story, and realizing that finally made me stop wanting to be a writer.
posted by rikschell at 6:06 AM on December 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

We had just moved in together for the first time, in Paris, when he confessed that my keeping a journal made him uncomfortable. People in relationships make all sorts of off-the-cuff comments, and they don’t mean anything, he explained. It made him nervous to think of me remembering or writing down things he said. He joked that if I wrote about him, it would be the end.

Sounds like someone who's aware that he'll come off as the bad guy if other people - more objective, less invested people - read his comments in his girlfriend's diary.
posted by subdee at 6:11 AM on December 6, 2022 [22 favorites]

In an article full of WTF sentences, for some reason this one stood out to me (emphasis mine):

He first broke up with me a few years ago because I wasn’t successful and independent enough. He wanted a partner, not a wife, he said.

Taking the author at her word that he really talked this way, he was making it clear for years how misogynistic his underlying views on gender were. I'm sorry for her that she stuck around so long -- like many abusive people, he must have a charismatic side as well for bringing people in and keeping them there.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:25 AM on December 6, 2022 [18 favorites]

And yeah, boo hoo, you are in the Upper West Side, not Brooklyn. Hard times, lady.

That's how I took her entire screed--- as a lot of whining. Certainly the guy was a jerk but it sounds like he was a jerk in the first installment of their relationship so I am puzzled why she ever went back to him in the first place.
posted by drstrangelove at 6:43 AM on December 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

Abusive relationships always look strange from the outside. "Why doesn't she just leave him?" "Why on earth did she go back to him?"

Also gross to suggest that an abused person's income invalidates their suffering, or their right to talk openly about the abuse.

"Whining."

Really?
posted by Zumbador at 6:48 AM on December 6, 2022 [78 favorites]

I am puzzled why she ever went back to him in the first place.

I'm not. At the risk of making assumptions, he sounds like he is probably charismatic, talented, and very skilled at that abusive thing where you alternately build someone up ("you are an amazing writer and I am so proud of your success!") and tear them down ("I am looking for a partner, not a wife"). That is a dynamic that is hard to break out of (especially for someone whose self-esteem might already not be the best) and people do frequently go back to the abusive partner.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:50 AM on December 6, 2022 [27 favorites]

I figured out who he is through a little googling. Never heard of him until now.
posted by Morpeth at 6:54 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Here I googled that for you: Why don't women leave abusive relationships
posted by hydropsyche at 6:58 AM on December 6, 2022 [16 favorites]

Susan Estrich’s daughter makes good.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:05 AM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I can't help but read this as an all too familiar story of a young female, despite being wealthy and well educated, who prioritizes having a heterosexual relationship and all its validation over her own self-respect and agency.

As an old person, I have no idea what is happening these days. Do girls and young women now get handouts with bullet points that include things like "validation from heterosexual relationship" vs "self-respect and agency"? I'm thinking no, no they do not. A recent NY Times article (archive, free version) about the 50th anniversary of the “Free to Be … You and Me" claims that "today we are defining people — especially children — by gender more than ever before, rather than trying to free both sexes from gender stereotypes."

That seems obvious as well as unfortunate. The writer is clearly angry and clearly giving her ex a taste of what he most feared, which is not exactly taking the high road. But humans are flawed and make mistakes. I am baffled by folks being dismissive of the writer's experience because she appears to be wealthy or comfortable. Dealing with asshole partners is worse if you don't have money but it is still a nightmare.

One of the reasons I consider myself solo poly and no longer look for a partner to live with is because in my very own life, if I have a partner, I slowly disappear over time. My husband didn't like my cooking (we split that) so eventually he did almost all of the cooking because, you know, I didn't want him to eat stuff he didn't like but that meant I didn't get to eat as much of what I liked. That is a tiny example and not wildly relevant here, but still, why would anyone imagine that the writer somehow needs to atone for her participation, which sounds like it was mostly agreeing to give up things she wanted.

We live in a white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy so yeah, here we are.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:07 AM on December 6, 2022 [39 favorites]

Seems like a relationship with two of them writer-types is gonna lean on the "someone who outdrew you" type of Hallelujah.
posted by NoThisIsPatrick at 7:10 AM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Seems like a relationship with two of them writer-types is gonna lean on the "someone who outdrew you" type of Hallelujah.

I'm watching a very talented and successful friend of mine struggle with her husband's complete inability to respect or support her EXTREMELY non-artistic career. He, like the author's boyfriend, wanted an impressive, educated, ambitious partner...who would abandon all of her ambitions to raise their kids and support him as a wife. She was supposed to be impressive enough to be better than the other wives and make him look good but never so impressive that she had to miss a kid's recital or make him pick up the dog at the groomer's.

If he'd given her a speech like the above during his proposal she'd have told him to pound sand. And if someone told him that's what he thought of his wife when he married her he'd have been shocked. But the cultural pressure runs deep and they both work in very traditional, conservative fields. By now, many years into a marriage, the things he says to and about her curdle my blood.

It's not writers, it's dudes.

the line from the piece that stuck with me was "I didn’t counter that maybe he should choose his words as if I’d remember them." A relationship is not a court of law but too many people take that as an excuse to just be offhand pieces of shit to their partners. Guess what: if being "relaxed and yourself" means you slip into being mean, petty, judgmental, and cutting toward your partner that just means you're an asshole.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 7:22 AM on December 6, 2022 [88 favorites]

[Gilbert Osmond] was immensely pleased with his young lady; Madame Merle had made him a present of incalculable value. What could be a finer thing to live with than a high spirit attuned to softness? For would not the softness be all for one’s self, and the strenuousness for society, which admired the air of superiority? What could be a happier gift in a companion than a quick, fanciful mind, which saved one repetitions, and reflected one’s thought upon a scintillating surface? Osmond disliked to see his thought reproduced literally, — that made it look stale and stupid; he preferred it to be brightened in the reproduction. His egotism, if egotism it was, had never taken the crude form of wishing for a dull wife; this lady’s intelligence was to be a silver plate, not an earthen one, — a plate that he might heap up with ripe fruits, to which it would give a decorative value, so that conversation might become a sort of perpetual dessert. He found the silvery quality in perfection in Isabel; he could tap her imagination with his knuckle and make it ring.

posted by praemunire at 7:28 AM on December 6, 2022 [35 favorites]

And, sure, there can be complex issues of privacy when it comes to writing from life, but most of the ethical issues relating to whether it's appropriate to disclose at all hinge on protecting someone who is vulnerable, not someone who is behaving badly.

I'm amazed people are arguing that this guy was somehow operating in good faith when he made comments like the "take me down a peg" one.
posted by praemunire at 7:30 AM on December 6, 2022 [25 favorites]

Hope her ex gets much enjoyment out of the Streisand Effect.
posted by Sing Or Swim at 7:37 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, the "take me down a peg" comment is a classic for the ages. Like, don't you be planning on believing that you are all that around me, missus. Yikes. It is really hard to break up with people. Eventually the writer will be grateful and not just angry about the split. That is my hope, anyway.
posted by Bella Donna at 7:41 AM on December 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

There are so many interesting elements to this story, and I am very glad the writer is free of this horrible, contemptible man.

One of the more striking angles here, to me, is how the boyfriend let his own fears turn him into (even more of) a jerk, and this created the situation he was most afraid of.

I hope her next book is about a writer who publishes an essay like this one, and the drama that follows (because we all know there will be some).
posted by rpfields at 7:49 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

I didn’t counter that maybe he should choose his words as if I’d remember them.

This right here is the dude’s answer about his behavior. It’s pretty much an old adage to never date a songwriter if you don’t want to be immortalized in verse.
posted by Devils Rancher at 7:57 AM on December 6, 2022 [10 favorites]

This is a fascinating article and I feel it in my bones.
I'm a preacher of sermons and I've been working at it for nearly two decades, which is roughly five times longer than the average preaching career.

I tell stories about people. They're my stories. I hold pretty closely to Anne Lamott's wisdom: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I'm also struck by the confessions of another titan of preaching, Lillian Daniel, who shared a story about her son's pain and discomfort as he listened to her preaching about his struggles with asthma. She promised him she wouldn't do it again.

So I only punch up. But that includes every single person who ever held a modicum of authority over me - including my family members. If they didn't want me to talk about them and the way the treated me, well, I suppose they ought to have had the foresight to imagine that the sensitive, prissy little boy-child might grow up to be a preacher. That fragile, loving little boy is my "Stutz shadow" and I owe it to him to tell the truth. But I try not to drag my own children up into the pulpit - which is probably the greatest professional challenge I've ever faced.
Because, my god, when you love your kids like I do they occupy so much real estate in your brain. I can't hardly crack open the good book without being overwhelmed by thoughts of how marvelous they are.

I suppose when they're 18 I'll ask for the privilege of preaching about their little miracles. Perhaps, by then, I'll be too old and irrelevant for anyone to want to listen.

I'm deeply proud of Isabel Kaplan for penning this article, I think it's wonderful and I'm going to support her into the future. What courage she must possess.
posted by Baby_Balrog at 7:57 AM on December 6, 2022 [49 favorites]

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Thank you so much for this amazing quote, which I have somehow missed until this moment.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:00 AM on December 6, 2022 [23 favorites]

He certainly seemed supportive and said all the right things when it was easy to do so. Once the relationship dynamic changed, he reverted to his true self.
posted by tommasz at 8:10 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

Weird that this guy "loves" Nora so much but can't take it? I feel like he missed something about her work here....

I saw some other advice column recently (Hax?) in which a new boyfriend told the letter writer she wasn't allowed to write anything about him and I thought, this one's not going to last.

And then there's the Anne Lamtt quote about if they wanted you to write about them better, they should have treated you better...
posted by jenfullmoon at 8:28 AM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

It has been 14 months since our 683-comment thread about the conflict between Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson (a.k.a. "Bad Art Friend" a.k.a. the kidney donor story).

Comparing and contrasting, as I consider whether the already-burgeoning online debate over Kaplan's piece will be as big as that one was:

- (no obvious race-related element)
+ (class element)
+ (sexism)
+ (bad het relationships)
? (the Larson-Dorland conflict was between 2 women, and this conflict is between a man and a woman where the man comes off worse; here on MetaFilter I think that means far fewer people will take his side but I don't know about the larger Internet)
- (no fraught "how we use social media today" element)
- (has not (yet?) stirred friends of the different sides in the conflict to publicly announce their allegiances)
- (does not bring new light re: workshops, magazines, or similar institutions in writing and publishing)
+ (connects to people's opinions of a beloved/well-regarded feminist author)
+ (many of us are writers of memoir-y nonfiction and/or have been written about by such writers)
- (no one here is doing an extraordinarily good altruistic deed that makes some other people uncomfortable to learn about)
+ (controversy over Kaplan's choice to not name her ex in the piece, given that she and her editors could/should have predicted that Internet sleuths would find him quickly)
? (fragmentation of conversation about this controversy into Hive, Post, Mastodon, and other venues instead of? being as concentrated on Twitter)
posted by brainwane at 8:31 AM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

I feel like too often these kinds of essays turn into public trials of the writer and the ex. Perhaps it is better to talk about the issues the writer raises while avoiding that trial. The issues she raised in this essay are common enough that they resonate with the lived experiences of men and women. Does it matter if they happened exactly as described or if there is a more complicated story we haven’t heard.
posted by interogative mood at 8:37 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

I don't know - maybe I've been married too long, but any decently talented writer could make my wife and young kids into monsters based on the things they say on a daily basis, and I don't know you, but I know people and my situation isn't particularly different. They could do it to me too.

Disagree? Go read reddit metafilter meta about yourselves sometimes.

So what I'm saying is I think it's a personally reasonable thing not to want to hear someone immortalize you in their words, and that just means she and her boyfriend were incompatible, which is no bad thing nor a particularly big thing.

I find the comment above from Devil's Rancher pretty interesting in that many (famous) song writers have songs about their spouse being out for *something* rather than love. Well, you're getting material and they are getting money. Who is using who?
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:54 AM on December 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

Also liking something but not wanting to live it is not weird nor notable - I'm not sure I think highly of the author based on that digression. I mean, do people who like Nine Inch Nails, action thrillers, or gangster rap deserve to be questioned? "well I just broke up with my spouse - did he not enjoy my empire of dirt?"
posted by The_Vegetables at 8:58 AM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

I really don't think the problem is someone's desire for their SO to not write about them (publicly, anyway; private writing is a different matter). I wouldn't want it either, honestly; at minimum I'd want to be wrapped up in layers of fiction; definitely it would be something I'd want to talk about with them and I'd want them to understand how I felt. I think it's an issue that's perfectly reasonable to break up over -- differing approaches to privacy and family life are a very legitimate dealbreaker. I knew someone once who used to publish things about people in his life, including me, and while it was never any kind of negative portrayal, it was just a weird and not very pleasant feeling to have an image of myself that I didn't particularly recognize, filtered through this person's eyes and massaged by their need for zingy material, broadcast to the world at large, including to people who knew me but not that well. It was frustrating knowing that various interactions with this person were not unlikely to make it into the next piece. It's legitimate to decide you don't want that in your life.

The parts that do seem like the real problem are the other things he (according to her) brought to the relationship: his misogyny, his lack of support, his hypocrisy, his need for hierarchy in the relationship, with him, of course, on top. From her portrayal, it also seems like she had agreed to not write about him or any kids and that he hadn't been able to trust her; or maybe he'd just used all of that as an excuse.
posted by trig at 9:19 AM on December 6, 2022 [19 favorites]

That was painful to read. I know there's a debate about writers (and songwriters) and the people around them and so on and so forth to be had, but it was really hard for me to get past the absolute contempt Kaplan's abusive ex rained on her because it was so reminiscent of some of my experiences with my own ex.

any decently talented writer could make my wife and young kids into monsters based on the things they say on a daily basis

I have a friend who used to do the exact opposite with his wife and kids: write short little fictional snippets to email lists, livejournal, Facebook, etc. that made them look adorable and funny. Not laughing at them, but with them, or making himself (the "him" character in the story) the butt of the joke. I know literary fiction is frequently about how protagonists and their circles in the litfic demographics are miserable but I also feel like the operating assumption that your spouse is going to write terrible things about you might be a you problem and not a them problem.

In this case the him problem might well have been that he wanted sole control over his image and that anything that reflected on him, even in a roman a clef sort of way, wasn't in his control. And certainly any success that Kaplan had was going to break any control he had of her image.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 9:24 AM on December 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

This resonated with me because I dated someone much like this. He was brilliant, avowedly feminist, charismatic, and supported me and my dreams right up until the point when they conflicted with his deep insecurity and childhood wounds. He needed me to bend to his (ever-changing) needs because, of course, I was the only one who understood him, and I did it because I gloried in fulfilling the role of the only woman who could keep up with and understand this obviously genius man. It was a stew of toxic patriarchal ideas we both were buying into. I hold him responsible him for his part, and me for mine. But decades later I reserve the greater part of my compassion for myself because while we were together I sacrificed my time, my energy, my labor, and my goals for his.

It took me a long time to value myself more than him, or more than any man, or even more than anyone else.

And so I applaud Isabel Kaplan. Getting yourself free takes a lot of work and strength and time. It isn’t always pretty, but it’s always worth it.
posted by minervous at 9:26 AM on December 6, 2022 [35 favorites]

I think it depends on whether you just like When Harry Met Sally, or if you are a writer expressing a love of a writer's craft. "I love women's authentic voices and stories - oh, but not yours" is where it landed, for me anyway. That's part of the craft of Kaplan's piece, and if she's lying, well then she is.

I have written about my spouse and my children, including a piece on a NYT blog, and I did back away from the cute personal anecdote piece as it started to get uncomfortable. My spouse has my back one hundred per cent, and also has our actual, living children's backs, and so for that reason we were able to discuss it in a way that respected me.

My husband knows that details will emerge in my writing that are obviously grounded in our relationship or our family and that's kind of impossible for me to eliminate. (Even in fantasy.) However I can make choices about whether I write About Us or whether I write about other people that have aspects of us. I think those conversations are very fair. But it doesn't quite sound like that's what went on here.
posted by warriorqueen at 9:29 AM on December 6, 2022 [8 favorites]

He was right about having a potential "wife" and not a "partner" in that she ended up publishing the breakup piece in the Guardian. Anyone can get published there.... No New Yorker? No Atlantic? Or alternatively, a smaller publication but one which shows her erudition and personal taste? Does a man spend his fortune at Harvard for such a bride?
posted by kingdead at 9:33 AM on December 6, 2022

Six Reasons to Stop Calling Women Females

#7: It makes you sound like a Ferengi.
posted by biogeo at 9:35 AM on December 6, 2022 [32 favorites]

Garfunkel and Oates: 50/50
posted by biogeo at 9:37 AM on December 6, 2022 [4 favorites]

> We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese: "I'm watching a very talented and successful friend of mine struggle with her husband's complete inability to respect or support her EXTREMELY non-artistic career."

This reminds me of a thing I saw on Twitter where someone asked for any movie where a husband whole-heartedly supports his wife's independent career (i.e.: he can't just be supportive because they're on the same team or doing the same job or whatever). The only suggestion that people could come up with was the Gundersons from Fargo. While I'm sure there are plenty of cases in real life, it is perhaps a little peculiar -- or telling -- that this kind of supportive husband dynamic is so rare in film.
posted by mhum at 9:53 AM on December 6, 2022 [18 favorites]

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

Although I agree with this sentiment there is also:

"When a writer is born into a family, the family is finished."
posted by sockpup at 10:11 AM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reminds me of a thing I saw on Twitter where someone asked for any movie where a husband whole-heartedly supports his wife's independent career

Ironically, Julie & Julia (the Julia Child bit)
posted by warriorqueen at 10:20 AM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

Do girls and young women now get handouts with bullet points that include things like "validation from heterosexual relationship" vs "self-respect and agency"?

I was in a relationship with an emotionally abusive person when I was in HS/college, and I recognize some of the behavior from the article, but for me, it actually wasn't a very gendered experience. Like, the "problems" my (ex) bf had with me were gendered, but the reason I stayed wasn't - it was simply that up until that point in my life, no one had paid me as much attention as he had, whether good or bad, so I clung to it, and I know I would have fallen into the same trap even if I were a dude.
posted by airmail at 10:23 AM on December 6, 2022 [14 favorites]

Christ, what an asshole.

But also, I'm trying to bend my mind around how You've Got Mail etc can be read as feminist. Surely it perpetuates the pretzeling of women referred to in the article.

I'm glad Ephron dumped wine on her insulter in real life, but I'm sad Meg Ryan's character never did so in any of Ephron's movies.
posted by splitpeasoup at 10:34 AM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Her boyfriend seems to be a very insecure guy who wants a girlfriend with a career, but not a particularly successful one. He appears to take no joy or pride in her success, always a huge red flag. He’s not necessarily wrong that their lives were destined to become material for her writing, as this piece indicates. It’s good they broke up, not a good match.
posted by The Gooch at 10:41 AM on December 6, 2022

> This reminds me of a thing I saw on Twitter where someone asked for any movie where a husband whole-heartedly supports his wife's independent career (i.e.: he can't just be supportive because they're on the same team or doing the same job or whatever).

The Slades in Young Adult, maybe? I can't remember if Beth has a career, but she has a hobby band that her husband Buddy does everything he can to promote and support.
posted by The Card Cheat at 10:51 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

movie where a husband whole-heartedly supports his wife's independent career

Hidden Figures. I think all (both?) of the husbands, but I remember I started sobbing when one of them gave his wife a mechanical pencil. I hadn’t realized how hard I was braced for the standard scene of "How can you spend more time on Work than Our Love”.
posted by clew at 11:01 AM on December 6, 2022 [19 favorites]

For those who enjoy hetero relationship strife among writers. I highly recommend Jancees Dunns How not to hate your husband after kids. The husband is Tom Vanderbilt
posted by CostcoCultist at 11:37 AM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

The WashPo op ed that he wrote* on Nora Ephron's death is basically a lengthy humble brag about how Nora thought he was great, very poorly disguised as praise for her being so magnanimous as to be friendly to little old him. For example:

She edited my writing when she had time, and she introduced me to many of her friends, who have helped me tremendously ever since. "I have been in touch with him for years,” she told one of them. “He wrote me when he was 12 and asked me to autograph a book. Further evidence of his brilliance."

* I'm pretty certain this is him - it mentions the not just the autographed books but also the autographed poster, so...
posted by penguin pie at 12:32 PM on December 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

@praemunire

That quote: just wow.
posted by Insert Clever Name Here at 12:44 PM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

My feckless ex is well-known for a significant act of geekery some time past (if you know me and/or him, plz not to dox, kthx), better-known than I'll ever be for anything. (Which is fine; notoriety is not a goal I have for myself.)

What pretty much nobody knows -- I unpublished it from the blog I wrote back then -- is the amount of time, energy, and stress I put into making him fulfill his responsibilities to that project, which would undoubtedly have fired him (preferably from a cannon) for flakiness if I hadn't stepped in to make him do basic things like check and respond to his email.

That's only one example of his fecklessness and abject failures to step up and be a partner, not a child. The flip side, of course, is that I wrote about that. In public. And I probably shouldn't have, and it's not wrong that he carried some hurt and resentment toward me about it. I also should have drawn the marriage in my own head in a much different way from the start, or recognized much earlier than I did that it wasn't gonna fly and called a halt to it. Water under the bridge now, but "you want a partner, not a child" and "if you're tempted to write frustratedly about him, actually talk TO him; if you feel you can't or it won't accomplish anything, that's BAD" are definitely lessons I took from my divorce from him.

Which is all to say that I saw myself in this piece too, recognize that writing publicly about relationship issues is pretty fraught, and am glad she did so anyway.
posted by humbug at 1:13 PM on December 6, 2022 [18 favorites]

That quote: just wow.

Henry James had this guy's number 150 years ago.
posted by praemunire at 1:26 PM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

Welp. Not only is the ex-boyfriend a bit of a twit in relationships, but he has insipid taste in “mots justes” based on that Washington Post piece.
posted by eviemath at 1:36 PM on December 6, 2022

I think that's the right guy everyone has found, his twitter feed has plugged Isabel a couple of times.
posted by Lanark at 1:40 PM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I thought sleuthing from articles like this to find the identity the person being talked about was not a thing we did here at MetaFilter?
posted by biogeo at 1:44 PM on December 6, 2022 [10 favorites]

That WaPo op-ed about Nora Ephron also had a bit I found weird (emphasis mine):

At Harvard, when I was editing the Crimson’s opinion page, she wrote an op-ed for us in response to a piece the newspaper had published 50 years earlier that she still remembered. It had belittled Wellesley girls like her as “tunicata,” fish that swim around for a while before settling down to breed. “I thought I might call up the guy who wrote it and ask him if he’s sorry,” she wrote to me. “But why should he be? He was right.”

It's weird both because, of all the things to write about her, why pick that one, with that framing, and because in her actual op-ed, Ephron wrote that she did call up the guy (whose piece she describes as "wrong-headed, simplistic" and "so mean, so condescending, so superior, and so sexist") and ask him if he was sorry. He was.
posted by trig at 1:47 PM on December 6, 2022 [13 favorites]

This guy sounds like a dbag. I don't like the intense impulse I have for her to name him so we can all yell at him. What a fuckin' douchebag.
posted by pelvicsorcery at 2:09 PM on December 6, 2022

As was already mentioned, this line in particular struck me: "He wanted a partner, not a wife."

What the fuck does that even mean? Surely, a wife is also a partner. Not to this guy, apparently, which sure seems to load a lot of subtext into those few words. Yikes.
posted by asnider at 2:54 PM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mod note: Just a reminder that we do not allow any form of doxxing or tracking down of people’s identities and sharing their info in these threads.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 3:18 PM on December 6, 2022 [13 favorites]

I didn't have a hugely strong reaction to the line "He wanted a partner, not a wife."

Afterall, how many times do we see women say they want a wife? Where wife is synonymous with a supportive partner who does all sorts of emotional, physical, and mental labour for you?

I always end up thinking of the sick systems thing when confronted by these kinds of messy and ugly relationship dramas. The need for high dramatics, the constant conflict, the endless autopsy of it all. And the way it demands a buy in, demands you participate.

I'm friends with all kinds of writers - poets, novelists, academics, journalists - but very rarely does this kind of thing come up. Sure I might end up referenced in a poem or two and have some feelings about it. But this kind of personal writing is very reminiscent of the early days of feminist blogging. The personal essay writ large with all those connections to the political but always always always requiring some conflict to start, and some personal one at that.

Because sure that guy is a jerk. Who the fuck says their partner needs to be taken down a peg? But in terms of social networks, it's a system that needs this kind of conflict and rewards it and feeds it.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:30 PM on December 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

a quick, fanciful mind, which saved one repetitions, and reflected one’s thought upon a scintillating surface

A mirror reflecting one at twice one’s natural size.

Text AI could maybe do that for all of us, heavenban us to the site where we make the coolest jokes.
posted by clew at 3:33 PM on December 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

Hmmm. On first read, the piece reads as if both partners in this relationship have grudges and envy issues, except the author is getting to tell their side right now.

I have hurt people by writing publicly about them, and have had a sibling ask me please never to write anything about them ever again. I used to love people, especially humorists, who wrote about their families (I think of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals, for instance, and Thurber's oeuvre), but I have come to believe that on the whole it's pretty hurtful. I can't really read David Sedaris any more, for instance, because he's so peevish about his family.

However, no matter what you do, people always think you're writing about yourself, your family, and your life, soI'd argue that at the very least, alter all the details and remember deniability is essential.
posted by Peach at 4:59 PM on December 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

He doesn't sound awesome (though we should also keep in mind the messenger.) That said, is it actually unreasonable that a person might choose to exit a romantic relationship with another writer out of fear the writer will use their most personal lives as content even if she promised not to? I mean, that seems like a reasonable concern to me, and another writer - one who is substantially interested in a famous writer who perfected exactly this - is even more likely to know it. I'm not sure what the timeline is here, but I also wonder if the guy got spooked by the Gould-Gessen split.
posted by vunder at 5:11 PM on December 6, 2022 [1 favorite]

I didn't have a hugely strong reaction to the line "He wanted a partner, not a wife."

In context, it's clearly an insult - "you're not intellectual enough for me."
posted by airmail at 5:12 PM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

In summary:

BF: GF, you need to be more successful.
GF: [becomes successful]
BF: Sure but your work is petty/shallow/harmful to our future family

There's no winning; BF will always find a way to feel superior.
posted by airmail at 5:19 PM on December 6, 2022 [25 favorites]

And if someone told him that's what he thought of his wife when he married her he'd have been shocked. But the cultural pressure runs deep

I love this line and need to think further on it.

really don't think the problem is someone's desire for their SO to not write about them (publicly, anyway; private writing is a different matter).

I know literary fiction is frequently about how protagonists and their circles in the litfic demographics are miserable but I also feel like the operating assumption that your spouse is going to write terrible things about you might be a you problem and not a them problem.

Feeling like this is the flip side of how my non-writing friends have recently been drawing back from putting pix and stories of their minor children on the internet. The kids deserve their privacy. But maybe as these are both adults, the privacy and agency is presumed present?

But otoh, "you're so vain, you probably think this song is about you" also holds true.
posted by beaning at 5:25 PM on December 6, 2022

Having seen 'successful' versions of relationships like the one described in that essay (but with no great wealth and no writers), I feel like the messy public drama might be a public service, and maybe there should be more of it.(I got lucky. I grew up thinking that's how adult relationships worked, but was also socially maladept and found pretzeling exhausting, and now enjoy my spinsterhood.)

One thing that struck me: the way the author tells it, the argument was not over how to raise future children generally. It was specifically about whether she might write about her family. They're both writers.
posted by mersen at 6:07 PM on December 6, 2022 [6 favorites]

I struggle to square the whole narrative of her BF becoming jealous after she attained success with her biography. Her first book was published when she wasn’t even 20 years old and still a undergrad at Harvard. She then went on to NYU got an MFA and returned to LA and got instantly hired in LA to do development at a major TV Network. Now she does book to film development at a major NY literary agency. Her parents are notable figures in the media industry.
She’s never been the struggling writer looking for any chance for their big break. She’s had the entire career gifted to her just like her legacy admission to Harvard.
posted by interogative mood at 6:55 PM on December 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

They're both writers.

This is the crux of it for me, as a writer myself. He's allowed to make big demands of how she works, what she writes about (even in her own journal!) while being able to write whatever he pleases in the meantime.

Like there's the misogyny of wanting a successful wife so long as she's successful on his terms, in a way that's not threatening to him, and there's doing so while you're in the same fields and expect total creative freedom for yourself.
posted by Jilder at 7:23 PM on December 6, 2022 [9 favorites]

BF didn't make the same pledge because that's not the type of writing he does: "He said he tried very hard to respect the kind of writing I do but the truth is, he doesn’t respect it quite as much as writing that doesn’t draw from life – or, rather, from the writer’s life. He is a journalist and historian, so he writes about other people’s lives."
posted by Iris Gambol at 7:59 PM on December 6, 2022 [7 favorites]

Yes, he is a different kind of writer, they aren’t a great match. Even the earlier comment about partner vs wife can be taken in this context. It’s not nice, but he took a writing job, she is a novelist. These aren’t the same pursuits and I get that too. He broke up with her when things were going extraordinarily well for her, that is ultimately a kindness. He’s allowed to end a relationship on these terms and it’s a maybe bit crass for her to trot out his worst comment without context in a public essay. It’s also incredible good publicity for her. She’s also allowed.
posted by vunder at 8:59 PM on December 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

BF didn't make the same pledge because that's not the type of writing he does

He didn't make that pledge because she didn't ask him to. We aren't doxxing him, so I won't link back, but he writes plenty about his life in his work (the quotes upthread about the Ephram obit stick out to me).

It doesn't matter what he does or doesn't write, she did not ask him to change the nature of his work so he didn't. And as soon as she started being as successful, or moreso, than him, he dropped her.
posted by Jilder at 12:56 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Liking Norah Ephron's writing while not wanting your partner to be Norah Ephron isn't an act of hypocrisy. I like the writing of plenty of people I'd never choose to be in a relationship with.

It feels like she (or her editor) was searching for a more interesting hook for this essay than my piece of shit abusive boyfriend left me because he's insecure and now I'm ruining him in the newspaper.
posted by zymil at 3:34 AM on December 7, 2022

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”

This presupposes that people want you to write about them at all.

This is uncomfortably close to the self-righteous, ungenerous, and egocentric mindset of the gossip, the tattle tale, the snitch. (“Behave around me because I have powers and malice”).

Morality aside, this also calls into question one’s abilities as a writer. In this huge world, are you so devoid of subject matter and imagination and invention that you have pick through the trash bins of ex-friends and family. Can you at least change enough detail to make them invisible to those who know them?

As to the article- lots of rush to judgement here without having heard the ex’s side of the story. (Question- does it reflect better or worse on him if he doesn’t respond? And if he does? Discuss.)
posted by BWA at 5:02 AM on December 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

lots of rush to judgement here without having heard the ex’s side of the story

This is a story we've all heard and/or experienced many times, though.

I don't purport to decide whether she was a good girlfriend, whether he had any good reasons for breaking up with her, etc., just that some of his reasons for breaking up with her reflect an all-too-common male insecurity that demands a partner be talented enough to feed his ego but not talented enough, or independent enough in their use of their talent, to threaten it.
posted by praemunire at 7:20 AM on December 7, 2022 [13 favorites]

Lots of thoughts, but I do find this piece illuminating in somewhat the sense that writers and people in publishing started posting their advance figures and salaries on Twitter. You fantasize about a career in the arts, and this is what it's really like. Including the fact that a lot of the people who seem to be making a grand success of it have a lot of money and/or nepotism behind them, which I think you can see between the lines (or not so between the lines) here. The relationship part of it is something I think more people can relate to and it makes sense that she wrote about that. Although it's funny; when I think of Ephron I think about an essay she wrote that was all about waiting on an inheritance which did not come and how that led to her own success.
posted by BibiRose at 7:35 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

I had a conversation with a friend the other day about trying to select for feminist men when dating, and he pointed out that a lot of men whose actions indicate they're not really feminists will tell you that they are, and others (like him) whose actions are very feminist will not label themselves feminist because they don't think they're doing enough, or have a right, to use that label. A lot of men will support women's careers, rights, etc. up until they have an impact on the men personally, and then all bets are off. Often this is hard to see until you hit that point. I think a lot of women have had the experience of being with someone who they thought was supportive, and stayed beyond the point they realized that wasn't actually true. Kudos to Kaplan for writing this piece, I find it brave and moving.
posted by rabbitrabbit at 7:42 AM on December 7, 2022 [18 favorites]

Great link, BibiRose, thank you. I once had a male friend, an ex-lover, mansplain mansplaining to me. For real. He considers himself a deeply committed feminist and a whole long list of other admirable characteristics. I adore the guy and also would never, ever live with him. No human can see all of their failings; that is just how we are. I have plenty of failings for sure. It just so happens that the society in which I live does not support privilege for women in the same way it supports them for men.
posted by Bella Donna at 8:25 AM on December 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Where wife is synonymous with a supportive partner who does all sorts of emotional, physical, and mental labour for you?

I think this is part of the issue and speaks to his likely deeply-ingrained misogyny. In his mind, at least, a wife is "less than," subordinate to and dependant upon a man (I doubt very much that same-sex relationships were top of mind when he made this comment).

He is very clearly using "wife" as an insult, and implicitly saying that she's his inferior by supposedly taking on that role rather than being "a partner." Of course, when she does become successful and allegedly better known than him (frankly, I'd never heard of either of them prior to this piece), suddenly he is upset that she is no longer filling the "wife" role that he claims he never wanted her to do in the first place.
posted by asnider at 8:42 AM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

an all-too-common male insecurity that demands a partner be talented enough to feed his ego but not talented enough, or independent enough in their use of their talent, to threaten it.

For some men, it is the ultimate status symbol to have a highly credentialed wife (like, Ivy education, recognized for her talent) who then leaves that aside and takes a "housewife" kind of role. But that all of a sudden becomes threatening if she wants to continue or restart her professional accomplishments. To me it is a weird dynamic but it is surprisingly common.
posted by Dip Flash at 9:40 AM on December 7, 2022 [15 favorites]

I don't purport to decide whether she was a good girlfriend, whether he had any good reasons for breaking up with her, etc., just that some of his reasons for breaking up with her reflect an all-too-common male insecurity that demands a partner be talented enough to feed his ego but not talented enough, or independent enough in their use of their talent, to threaten it.

She says he broke up with her because he feared she would use their life as fodder for her writing. Which, based on her writing this piece which shares intimate details of their relationship about five minutes after they split, it does not seem like he was totally off base.

It appears also true that he was a rather insecure guy who wanted his girlfriend to be professionally successful, but only up to the point that it was not a threat to his own standing. He wanted a hierarchical relationship where he was the one in the higher position. So she’s probably better off for getting dumped.
posted by The Gooch at 10:38 AM on December 7, 2022

Which, based on her writing this piece which shares intimate details of their relationship about five minutes after they split, it does not seem like he was totally off base.

There's a difference between "please don't write about me" while you're still in a relationship and trying to appease the guy, and when you have ended on bad terms already, so FUCK IT, would be my guess.
posted by jenfullmoon at 12:10 PM on December 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

> "... about five minutes after they split"

They broke up when her first novel came out in 2007. She wrote this fifteen years later.
posted by kyrademon at 2:28 PM on December 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

I suspect my own tendency to prefer gender neutral language obscured the very concept of wife as an insult. That just did not occur to me at all! Wives are great! What I saw it as shorthand for was not at all what was intended.

I think there is also, still, a deep and weird conflict in this literary writing milieu of very specifically mothers and daughters that personally I'd be wary of. The second and third wave feminist semi-biography tensions, or the continuing clashes (Lauren...something, using her mother's experience of sexual assault is the one I came across recently) make me reluctant, myself, to immortalise in prose the relationship I have with my child. Could it be interesting? Possibly, queer butch mother, non-binary queer kid, navigating two very very different experiences of gender and sexuality. But regardless, even just writing my own experience, it exposes my child. The mommy blogger era doesn't help that sense of endangering or exploiting a kid through your own creative work.

I have a lot of sympathy for men leaving women for becoming too successful. I am also deeply deeply suspicious of a very specific kind of privilege in writing and feminism that does exploit the personal for individual gain.
posted by geek anachronism at 2:50 PM on December 7, 2022

She was born in 1990. The article linked above is about a recent relationship not from her freshman year at Harvard. I think she considers NSFW her first true novel while Hancock Park was a YA Novel.

I think her article in the Guardian is part of her reaction/processing /healing after her long term bf left her (one that also seems to go back to her Harvard days). There is always a period of what was wrong with me, why did they dump me; followed by a Jesus Christ that asshole was a loser where every fault is identified, magnified and often shared with friends and confidants.

We don’t know and can’t really know what actually happened. Objective truth doesn’t matter, unless you have some personal connection to those involved. We can still use the article to talk about our own pain and faults and perhaps find ways to heal or be less shitty.
posted by interogative mood at 2:51 PM on December 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

> "I think she considers NSFW her first true novel while Hancock Park was a YA Novel."

Oh, that's odd. I stand corrected, then.
posted by kyrademon at 3:11 PM on December 7, 2022

@geek anachronism: I think I misunderstood your comment which I quoted/responded to! I agree, wives are great! In my mind, wife and partner are essentially synonyms, except the latter is broader (all wives are partners, but not all partners are wives -- at least in an ideal world); but the BF used them to mean two very different things and "wife" was definitely intended to have negative implications in his usage suggesting, at the very least, that he would think of his wife (whether legally married or not) as someone not his equal. It's pretty gross.
posted by asnider at 9:49 AM on December 8, 2022

> And yeah, boo hoo, you are in the Upper West Side, not Brooklyn. Hard times, lady.

She wanted to live in the neighborhood her friends are in. Instead they moved to the neighborhood he wanted.

> A big old Manhattan apartment?

Where are you getting that it was big? Maybe it was, especially if she comes from money, but I'm not seeing that in the piece. It's the apartment of his dreams, not hers, because she was crouching to fit into the role he wanted her to fill.
posted by The corpse in the library at 4:58 PM on December 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

> This reminds me of a thing I saw on Twitter where someone asked for any movie where a husband whole-heartedly supports his wife's independent career (i.e.: he can't just be supportive because they're on the same team or doing the same job or whatever).

I’ll add Always Be My Maybe and the Masterpiece TV show Victoria to this list. Neither is without complications, but I am delighting at the fictionalized Albert swallowing his pride to be a supportive husband to her royal majesty. I have 4 episodes left of Season 3 so we’ll see how it plays out!
posted by inkytea at 8:09 AM on December 9, 2022

Oh hey, I found that advice column I mentioned on a similar topic: from a Carolyn Hax chat at WaPo.

I've written freelance articles for years, drawing mostly on my life experience. My usual tone is ironic/humorous, but with what I like to think is some real poignancy and insight.
My boyfriend of eight months has requested that I not write about him (anymore). He was initially ok with it, but has read the handful of things I've published since we started dating and has changed his mind. I never say anything that reflects poorly on him or that I think he would find embarrassing; usually, if anything, I am self-deprecating. Before this relationship, I dated someone else for more than five years and wrote about that relationship freely with his blessing. (I actually think part of what my current bf is uncomfortable enough is the implied comparison between that relationship and this one.)
My writing life will be quite a bit more difficult if I can't write from life anymore. And he has already said no to not just articles that focus on our relationship, but ones that mention him in even a cursory way. It is an understandable request, but I can't shake the feeling that it's controlling and sabotaging, hopefully unintentionally. How would you approach this? I really want to keep the bf, but I also do not want to lose my creative outlet, which has been a real lifeline during the last couple very weird years.

His is a fair request. I wouldn't want to be written about, either. I have some highly confessional writer friends whose work I love and whose inner circles I wonder about all the time. How do they feel about this?
I also pour out thousands of words here and say very little about my family. You know my dogs better than you know my people. But you know a fair amount about me. So the line is a walkable one.
All that said: When you "can't shake the feeling that it's controlling and sabotaging," you also have a serious suspicion that you can't wisely ignore. Is your imagination is getting carried away, as the "unintentionally" might suggest? Or is there context to support your concerns?
If the latter, then please trust your gut.

posted by jenfullmoon at 8:08 AM on December 13, 2022