What if you suspect your husband is fantastically evil?

February 21, 2024 2:01 PM

Shot: "The Lure of Divorce" In which Emily Gould writes: "Seven years into my marriage, I hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it." (continued inside)

Shot: "The Lure Of Divorce"

In which Emily Gould writes: "Seven years into my marriage, I hit a breaking point — and had to decide whether life would be better without my husband in it. Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot. I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain. Some days, I’d have drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which I ate at restaurants so the drink order didn’t seem too unusual. The restaurant meals cost money, as did the gym, as did all the other random things I bought, spending money we didn’t really have on ill-fitting lingerie from Instagram and workout clothes and lots of planters from Etsy."

Chaser: "I Think My Husband Is Trashing My Novel On Goodreads!"

In which an anonymous letter writer asks Emily Gould for help in Gould's advice column, telling a story with eerily familiar beats. "For reasons too complicated to get into, I am starting to strongly suspect that my beloved has been using an array of anonymous accounts to post some of the most negative and cruel comments about the book. In fact, I believe he may be the main source of the hatred that has been directed toward me, likely driven by jealousy that I have achieved something he never could. Unfortunately, I am only 85 percent certain that I am correct."

Non-paywalled links:
The Lure Of Divorce
I Think My Husband Is Trashing My Novel On Goodreads!

posted by MiraK (50 comments total)

That first article sure is something! I have a conspiracy theory that the letter writer is also Emily Gould.
posted by MiraK at 2:15 PM on February 21 [7 favorites]

Oh yikes. Writer + writer relationships always seemed like the most frustrating brew of insecurity. In my early 20s I dated someone who was much further along in their career (late 20s!) and while in retrospect they were nothing but supportive I felt wildly anxious about the possibility that I was functioning like arm candy.

The ending is hopeful

We still see the therapist twice a month. We talk about how to make things more equal in our marriage, how not to revert to old patterns. I have, for instance, mostly given up on making dinner, doing it only when it makes more sense in the schedule of our shared day or when I actually want to cook. It turns out that pretty much anyone can throw some spaghetti sauce on some pasta; it also turns out that the kids won’t eat dinner no matter who cooks it, and now we get to experience that frustration equally. Keith’s work is still more stable and prestigious than mine, but we conspire to pretend that this isn’t the case, making sure to leave space for my potential and my leisure.

posted by spamandkimchi at 2:16 PM on February 21 [2 favorites]

“Never read reviews” rings truer than ever.
posted by Artw at 2:20 PM on February 21

Wow, poor Emily Gould, tbqh. Poor husband. That all seems really difficult and scary.

Emily Gould is a very different person from me and is interested in a very different type of writing, a type of writing which really does absolutely nothing for me at all, but there are a lot of worse people out there. Even in utopia, people would still be very dramatic types and some of those types would tip over into having a first bipolar episode because that's what people do.
posted by Frowner at 2:30 PM on February 21 [4 favorites]

I appreciate The Cut's special kind of messy personal essay because they're so juicy to read. But this, along with that piece by the finance columnist who was scammed into handing over $40k cash in a shoebox to a fake FBI agent just makes me think "you couldn't waterboard this information out of me."
posted by adso at 2:33 PM on February 21 [24 favorites]

Onanism.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:41 PM on February 21 [5 favorites]

I searched Emily Gould on reddit and apparently she is infamous for being a messy person who writes openly about all her messiness. I can see why she's successful. She's a fantastic writer, the piece really got me in a rubbernecker-at-a-car-crash kind of way. And I don't believe for one second that she doesn't know what impression she is making on her audience.

But also at the same time, all over reddit, there are comments like this one from people who apparently know her personally, which make it seem like for all her self awareness she might truly and incorrigibly be exactly what she presents herself as being. I guess she makes for excellent reading but her life sounds scary af.
posted by MiraK at 2:46 PM on February 21 [18 favorites]

I’d guess anyone’s life would be better without Gould.

This is unnecessarily cruel.
posted by knotty knots at 2:53 PM on February 21 [17 favorites]

I got a real Leah McLaren vibe reading these.
posted by Jessica Savitch's Coke Spoon at 2:56 PM on February 21

There’s been a spate of “divorce is great” publications recently. I feel like they generally say far more about the author’s specific circumstances than anything particularly generalizable.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:12 PM on February 21 [8 favorites]

I feel like they generally say far more about the author’s specific circumstances than anything particularly generalizable.

Maybe not universally generalizable, but a lot of marriages do suck.
posted by clawsoon at 3:17 PM on February 21 [6 favorites]

I mean, a lot of people suck.

Doesn't mean I particularly want to read about them.
posted by leotrotsky at 3:26 PM on February 21

Mod note: One deleted and reply to it left up. Please be kind, and carefully consider how you are contributing to threads before commenting.
posted by travelingthyme (staff) at 3:26 PM on February 21 [4 favorites]

But also at the same time, all over reddit, there are comments like this one from people who apparently know her personally, which make it seem like for all her self awareness she might truly and incorrigibly be exactly what she presents herself as being. I guess she makes for excellent reading but her life sounds scary af.

But isn't that comment (and similar ones) something that could feasibly describe many media personalities and memoirists? Especially as teens and 20somethings?! My guess is that Gould is just unable (or unwilling) to be savvier in protecting her image, and that she enjoys dropping in messy details about a messy life. Which makes me a big fan, because I'm a sympathetic reader who is also nosy, and who appreciates details about pitching a fit over expensive takeout food (yikes) and, previously, the minutae of taking care of her friend's dog or figuring out what to make for dinner in the midst of a breakup or how many cigarettes she smokes on a bad day. Those kinds of details are thinner and thinner in memoir writing these days, and I get it, because everyone lives under a microscope now and I imagine this kind of public treatment is a nightmare.

I just don't buy that she's a bad person or even an insufferable one. The writer of that Reddit comment seems to be coming from a place of BEC, which I totally get. And I could also see someone describing me that way if they only knew me in my teens and twenties. And probably a lot of other people, too. It just seems like people decided to dislike Gould sometime around the Gawker years, and everything she's done since then confirms what they always thought. IMHO if her essay was written anonymously or under a different name, as someone with a clean slate in the public eye, people would've been more sympathetic. But because it's Emily Gould, she deserves what she gets, etc. etc.
posted by knotty knots at 3:27 PM on February 21 [5 favorites]

more about the author’s specific circumstances than anything particularly generalizable.

Yeah, I can enjoy memoir or related writing, but I have a hard time with this sort of writing that fails to connect with life beyond the author's narrow personal orbit. I just finished Andrew Leland's book, The Country of the Blind, which while it centers much of his personal experience with going blind, is equal part a history of blindness and the experiences of other people. He takes what is happening to him as a jumping off point to be curious about what has and is happening to other people who have experienced something similar to him.

There is a bit of that in Gould's essay, but it's too much of a cursory lit review. What I find myself distracted by while reading it is the wealth of it all - she grew up in one of the richest counties in the country, went to two fancy colleges, and by her own account sounds to have a pretty sweet life, materially speaking (so much time to read about divorce, daily restaurant meals, etc.) - yes, there is a lot of talk about being stressed over her spending in the abstract, but in a way similar to that infamous tweet by dril, i.e. "Food $200 Data $150 Rent $800 Candles $3,600 Utility $150someone who is good at the economy please help me budget this. my family is dying." Privileged people can have mental breakdowns and privileged people can have interesting things to say, but I have a hard time when they seem incapable of acknowledging it.
posted by coffeecat at 3:39 PM on February 21 [11 favorites]

I read that, and it felt like an example of the unreliable narrator trope, but then I wondered if the author was intentionally using that trope because of all the details she left in. I guess part of what makes it interesting is that sort of reality show feeling of "This person HAS to know how they're coming off, so I can feel comfortable using this as entertainment because I'm not ACTUALLY watching someone self-destruct. It's just editing and television." But at the same time, I just don't know.
posted by fnerg at 3:42 PM on February 21 [5 favorites]

I'm getting a little verklempt here...
posted by Czjewel at 3:46 PM on February 21 [2 favorites]

But part of what makes unreliable narrators interesting is having to fill in the blanks outside of what they're telling you. In a work of fiction, the author's using the device intentionally, and it's fun. In this article, it feels like someone's asking to crash on your couch for a week, and you're trying to figure out if you can trust them not to stay for a month.
posted by fnerg at 3:47 PM on February 21 [18 favorites]

I do feel like divorce memoirs have just been everywhere lately, and it sounds like she read way too many in her mania. I could see how when life is a mess, divorce could sound like the obvious solution given her reading material, whether the marriage was the problem or not. I'm glad that counseling has helped them resolve some long-simmering resentments and find a way to be happier.

She didn't mention her parents at all (surprisingly for a memoirist) but it made me wonder about them. My spouse and I feel unusual for Gen Xers in that both of our sets of parents have happily celebrated their 50th wedding anniversaries. (I know not all couples who've reached 50 years of marriage are happy, but our parents really do seem to be). We're extremely lucky in our role models, and I know most of our generation just haven't had that luck. If you don't know what a happy relationship looks like, I'm sure it's harder to get through the normal ups and downs.
posted by hydropsyche at 3:54 PM on February 21 [5 favorites]

I'm sorry, but very well-off authors married to other very well-off authors giving advice to other well-off authors married to other well-off authors about the very well-off author type problems they're experiencing in their marriage while also having worked through some very well-off author type problems of their own and writing about those extensively is just a bit too much of a wankfest for me (although she's not a bad writer).

Combined with the 50k in a shoebox antics just one week ago, it seems like The Cut is the new outlet for the terminally self-centered and out of touch.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 4:26 PM on February 21 [19 favorites]

Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot. I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured, troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking. Drinking felt necessary because it slightly calmed my racing brain.

My father has bipolar disorder, so I expect I know how the general article goes.
posted by pwnguin at 4:39 PM on February 21 [11 favorites]

Reading these comments, I am reminded that I have had a couple of friends who some people really disliked, not always totally unjustifiably. My friends weren't/aren't bad people - they're if anything very generous, very principled and not afraid to speak truth to power - but they can be a lot. I love them and view them as very special and interesting souls, but it's partly because I'm a sort of quotidian sloth of a person that I find it enlivening to be around these people who are always burning brightly...so that's kind of a roundabout way to say that I could see that some people really find Emily Gould a fascinating and engaging friend and other people don't.
posted by Frowner at 4:50 PM on February 21 [26 favorites]

When I'm in a certain mood, often an edgy-angsty-judgemental one, this type of writing brings out the rubbernecker in me. When I'm in a better place, it just makes me sad.

Gould tells these stories in a compelling way but I'm not sure she realizes the many ways some of these revelations could be held and used against her down the line. It seems almost like a kind of self-harm.
posted by rpfields at 4:58 PM on February 21 [7 favorites]

I wasn't very far into all of this before thinking, "yup, this sounds like she's having a bipolar episode."

As for the chaser article, I suspect I've seen similar on Reddit.
posted by jenfullmoon at 5:19 PM on February 21 [3 favorites]

I'm sorry, but very well-off authors married to other very well-off authors giving advice to other well-off authors married to other well-off authors about the very well-off author type problems they're experiencing in their marriage while also having worked through some very well-off author type problems of their own and writing about those extensively

I'm not in love with this piece (to me, the more interesting thread to follow would be the implications of making a huge life choice while off your rocket, then "coming back to yourself" and nearly following through with it), but if you think the problem of reconciling the demands of two careers against a backdrop of ingrained sexism is limited to very well-off authors married to other very well-off authors...you must not speak to many women.
posted by praemunire at 5:27 PM on February 21 [19 favorites]

> I'm a sort of quotidian sloth of a person that I find it enlivening to be around these people who are always burning brightly.

This sentence is *chefkiss* perfectly worded and a perfectly lovely thought. Also, #mood! I would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

> It seems almost like a kind of self-harm.

Yes, this is my feeling exactly. She's hugely talented as a writer but I get a definite touch of thanatos from behind her drive to share what she shares the way she shares it.

> As for the chaser article, I suspect I've seen similar on Reddit.

So you see nothing out of the ordinary in it? Dang, am I alone, then, in my conspiracy theory that she's the latter writer herself? I think I have an unusually strong hankering for drama today lol.
posted by MiraK at 5:50 PM on February 21 [3 favorites]

if you think the problem of reconciling the demands of two careers against a backdrop of ingrained sexism is limited to very well-off authors married to other very well-off authors...you must not speak to many women.

Absolutely not, I just think the specifics of this person's problems, the way they express themselves, and the solutions and results offered, are definitely very limited to well-off intellectuals. My point being, if a similar thing happened to a working class woman, this would probably have ended very differently and much worse. That Gould is still married, still living in a three-bedroom apartment in NYC, still working as a features writer for New York Magazine, and had apparently a pretty good time while institutionalized are all testaments to her privilege.

Other people, other women, going through the same kind of thing while not as privileged often end up divorced, homeless, sexually abused, in prison, or dead.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:54 PM on February 21 [7 favorites]

Yes, but...so? I'm not sure how that invalidates her experience as a subject of inquiry.

P.S. No one has a good time while on a mental ward. More specifically, no one has a good time on Seroquel.
posted by praemunire at 6:52 PM on February 21 [9 favorites]

A late-in-life bipolar diagnosis is a lot to reckon with. Even hypomanic episodes leave you feeling exposed and make you feel like you have to explain yourself. It’s especially hard when depression was your dominant pole. For a confessional writer like Gould, this piece feels like it’s part of a healing process— one that I very much appreciate.
posted by SaneCatLady at 7:08 PM on February 21 [7 favorites]

Mira! I love your conspiracy theory and I’m happy to let my brain churn over it. The first hurdle I can think of is that I don’t think Emily’s third book did distinctly better than her other two or got more hate; I also don’t think there was a point in the Gould/Gessen marriage recently that she was getting more accolades and attention than he was? Like I think you could make an argument that she’s consistently been the more popular/well known (and, I’d say, better) writer— but there hasn’t been an envy inducing shift in fortunes recently. In a way, I could more easily see her doing it to him, with this new book about their kid… God, what a juicy setup. I’d read the hell out of an Emily Gould novel that was just thinly disguised versions of her and Keith spiraling into paranoia about their mutual Goodreads reviews.
posted by Merricat Blackwood at 8:19 PM on February 21 [4 favorites]

I read both these articles yesterday and the first one just made me sad. I hope that there's a reasonable outcome there for the kids at least. I hope that Emily and her husband find a way to be kind to each other.

Also I feel like an idiot but didn't NY Mag also do a profile of him fairly recently as a pre-book hype piece? It was full of details about the profiler having dinner at their apartment, Emily was present and gave quotes, there was some ambivalence (from Gould but also the author?) about the novelty of the dad writing the kid-centric memoir - I can't get it to come up on a site search. Am I imagining it, did I read it somewhere else, or did they scrub it from the site?? Weird.

Anyway I wonder if the posting of both articles on the same day was deliberate on Gould's part or actually a kind of asshole move by the magazine/an editor. I thought the actual advice was terrible - who honestly ever thinks that snooping on someone's phone is the correct move, ever? I can't imagine advising someone to do it, unless I was more interested in the resulting drama than in anyone getting their needs met.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 7:11 AM on February 22

Also I feel like an idiot but didn't NY Mag also do a profile of him fairly recently as a pre-book hype piece? It was full of details about the profiler having dinner at their apartment, Emily was present and gave quotes, there was some ambivalence (from Gould but also the author?) about the novelty of the dad writing the kid-centric memoir - I can't get it to come up on a site search.

I feel like I read some profile recently too, mentioning his new book, but no idea where. You're not hallucinating, at least.

(MiraK, I like your theory also.)
posted by praemunire at 7:51 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

Back when Twitter was still Twitter, I followed Gould and really kind of liked her on that platform. She seemed a little annoying but ultimately sincere. And I was a long-term fan of Emily Books. I felt sympathetic reading this piece, because it reminded me of how I felt when I started taking antidepressants and then drinking to calm the jitters they gave me.

Another one of the recent divorce authors always gave me a super negative, self-absorbed impression on Twitter-- I recognized her name instantly-- and discussions of the book add to that impression for me, but I haven't tried actually reading the book.

As far as money in the shoebox article, I have come to suspect that this is a writer who's tired of sucking columns out of her finger and decided to invest that money (chump change to her) just to get a slightly different kind of article that might give her a breakthrough even if it made her look silly.
posted by BibiRose at 8:53 AM on February 22

Is it typical for a psychiatrist to increase a patient's medication simply on demand? And there's no mention that there was any monitoring of the effects afterwards. This may not have been the sole cause, but it's hard to ignore the impact on her life and marriage.
posted by tommasz at 9:22 AM on February 22

Is it typical for a psychiatrist to increase a patient's medication simply on demand?

If you go to your doctor and tell them that it feels like you need an increased dose of your antidepressant, if you're not already at a dangerously high level, you're likely to get it. This wasn't a typical response to an increased dosage of an antidepressant, it's what can happen when someone bipolar (undiagnosed) gets a high dosage of antidepressants. It can be difficult to distinguish someone who is the form of bipolar that is primarily depressive from an "ordinarily" depressed person until this kind of thing happens.
posted by praemunire at 10:25 AM on February 22 [3 favorites]

discussions of the book add to that impression for me

The NYT review was terrible, though, basically just "but what if marriage is good, though" (from someone with a special-needs kid who thus really needs to believe in the Institution of Marriage so she can have faith her husband won't leave her, despite the [really unfortunate] odds in that situation).
posted by praemunire at 10:28 AM on February 22 [1 favorite]

On the one hand, as confessionals of the writing class airing their dirty laundry go, I would take one hundred of this essay over (oh, let's just grab one name off of an obnoxiously long list) Updike.

On the other hand, when we talk about the death of print media and so much of what I see getting published is the travails of the absurdly comfortable it's hard not to nod and say, "well, there you go, then."

I spent two and a half years in a relationship with a woman who was (amongst other things) dangerously bipolar and so there were a lot of things in this article that felt like murky reflections of that time, weirdly distorted by the ways that wealth distorts everything.

Everyone's hardest battle is their hardest battle, but when eating out for every meal isn't financially ruinous and your mania-fueled affair is with one of the instructors at a yoga retreat instead of a violent drunk who approached you on Hollywood Boulevard and you're allowed the dignity of checking into a psychiatric facility voluntarily instead of being dragged there by the police and your biggest problem in your relationship is your professional jealousy when you compare your partner's achievements to your four publshed books and your social status is such that there is a publishing platform eager to help you turn your experience with mental illness into something you can monetize, well.

It's not that you don't have problems, but they feel a lot more like "pwobwems".
posted by Parasite Unseen at 10:36 AM on February 22 [5 favorites]

So trivial and self-absorbed it was hard just to skim through it
posted by tovarisch at 11:21 AM on February 22 [2 favorites]

I read Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind over a decade ago and the divorce article echos a lot of what she went through. The exposition on mental health struggles is real -and can be exasperating to a spouse and a tough read for others. I’m not opposed to people learning about voluntary options and making progress while living through questions -dignity matters and reading about it might help people with undiagnosed BPD get treatment without force. Britney Spears and Sinead O’Conner are further along this road less traveled… as well as Mariah Carey, Halsey, Stephen Fry, Richard Dreyfuss, Mel Gibson and Kanye West. I’m glad Gould seems to be making progress.
posted by childofTethys at 12:08 PM on February 22

I got half-way through this and stopped because it felt ick - some things should just stay private, I thought to myself. I had the same feeling of concern and alarm as if a work colleague suddenly burst into tears in the lunchroom.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 12:18 PM on February 22 [1 favorite]

On the other hand, when we talk about the death of print media and so much of what I see getting published is the travails of the absurdly comfortable it's hard not to nod and say, "well, there you go, then."

When we're talking about relatively mainstream publications, this isn't exactly a change from the past, though. Nor are people defecting today from this to hard-hitting tales of street mania, I think?

(Also, I'm happy to be corrected by anyone who knows better, but just looking at these two's biographies, I would assume they are basically living off the husband's job as a Columbia professor. Neither of them have ever had a smash hit and almost Gould's entire career has been conducted in the age of precarity. They rent and they don't have great health insurance. No obvious family money. In other words, probably much more "upper middle class" than the lady who put $50K in a shoebox.)
posted by praemunire at 12:36 PM on February 22 [4 favorites]

I will say that between the two of them they have convinced me to read the absolute banger of a tell-all that Raffi is going to write in twenty years.
posted by Parasite Unseen at 12:42 PM on February 22 [16 favorites]

(Also, I'm happy to be corrected by anyone who knows better, but just looking at these two's biographies, I would assume they are basically living off the husband's job as a Columbia professor. Neither of them have ever had a smash hit and almost Gould's entire career has been conducted in the age of precarity. They rent and they don't have great health insurance. No obvious family money. In other words, probably much more "upper middle class" than the lady who put $50K in a shoebox.)

This is a question of definitions, I guess, but if you live in a three bedroom apartment in Manhattan (spacious enough that you can afford to just not use one of the bedrooms and leave it to your kid if he wants to use it to play videogames sometimes), can afford to just not budget and spend money however you please, and can afford several thousand dollars of non-insurance covered mental health facility fees, then you're pretty well off. I get the impression even with the author's uncontrolled spending, they weren't really in danger of ending up on the street or anything, it just wasn't great for their finances.

Also, the husband's father owns a house on Cape Cod, so I'm guessing there's some generational wealth here too. They might not be very wealthy by NYC standards, but they're probably comfortably in the top 5% for the US as a while.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:26 PM on February 22 [2 favorites]

They don't live in Manhattan, they live in Bed-Stuy (that's Brooklyn), and their apartment is $4750/mo, which is on the lower side for a 3-bed these days. And it's pretty obvious from the article that her uncontrolled spending was a big problem, placing a huge strain on their marriage. You don't lose your shit over the cost of Chinese takeout unless that bank balance is getting low.

Also, the husband's father owns a house on Cape Cod, so I'm guessing there's some generational wealth here too.

He and his parents are Jews who left the U.S.S.R. in the early 80s, which, you may have heard, was not exactly a path conducive to the transfer of any wealth whatsoever. His dad was a programmer and his mom a translator, I believe.

So, while this family is certainly better off than many New Yorkers--and if they were able to handle the expenses of her hospitalization that insurance didn't cover without filing for bankruptcy, they've been fortunate--I don't think "absurdly comfortable" or even "very well off" are the right words for them. I would imagine the average active Mefite is roughly comparable in affluence. They're a family with two kids, no property, one car, and (apparently) lousy insurance. Columbia doesn't even offer pensions to professors, which would have given them a leg up.

Unlike the shoebox lady, whose family has named chairs.

(I gleaned all this stuff from a couple of online sources, after I vaguely remembered following her desperate apartment search, which she chronicled online like every other damn thing, a year or so ago.)
posted by praemunire at 6:33 PM on February 22 [6 favorites]

Yeah, for me, it doesn't look like there are any real markers of Gould or her husband "coming from money." And I doubt her husband's job is that lucrative or even permanent as an assistant professor at the journalism school. On the other hand, they both have ivy league-caliber educations and they have apparently been able to repair the damage from her manic spending sprees. Maybe there is a grandma somewhere who paid for college or left a bit of money, which already makes you luckier than most. It's almost like, they are writers in NYC with two kids, there has to be some financing in this equation somewhere. But my guess is no serious money. But they are in sort of a fortunate class position and they have connections and I sense that they will stay afloat through whatever combination of tangible and intangible resources.
posted by BibiRose at 4:23 AM on February 23 [2 favorites]

Why do we have to be “ kind” about Emily Gould? I thought yum/yuck was a standard of Metafilter? I think she’s someone who got very lucky on the interwebz despite not having much insight or actual writing ability.
posted by Ideefixe at 8:43 AM on February 23 [2 favorites]

can afford to just not budget and spend money however you please, and can afford several thousand dollars of non-insurance covered mental health facility fees, then you're pretty well off.

Or, and hear me out, you're in the kind of debt that would send a lot of people screaming nude into the darkness never to return. The first secret I learned about the friends who always seemed to be living way better than I ever could was, they have family money. The second secret I learned about the friends who always seemed to be living better than I could was, they had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. And not student loan or mortgage debt, just straight up consumer and medical debt.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 10:19 AM on February 23 [6 favorites]

But they are in sort of a fortunate class position and they have connections and I sense that they will stay afloat through whatever combination of tangible and intangible resources.

This is a tangent, but I feel like this is something that we more or less took for granted for intellectuals in the 1950s through 2010s and that is becoming less true every minute. Even the difference between his career and hers, starting about a decade apart, is telling; he was able to land at a couple of institutions to give him some stability and she hasn't been. It's deeply troubling. My friends and acquaintances in the arts and such who've stayed in NYC now that we're all solidly into the child-rearing age range are all very talented and deserving, but they all also have money coming in from a spouse or their family or they at least have strong family connections in their field. It's terrible for culture, and it's terrible for the city.
posted by praemunire at 11:23 AM on February 23 [5 favorites]

The second secret I learned about the friends who always seemed to be living better than I could was, they had hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt.

Yep, the debt you occasionally catch a glimpse of would curl the hair on your toes.
posted by praemunire at 11:25 AM on February 23

And look nobody is obligated to care what happens to these people one way or another, but I just see a lot of assumptions (not only here, also in the wider internet commentary) that like, they just paid for her uninsured inpatient stay with a wad of cash or something, so fuck them. That's quite possibly, even likely, not the case at all.
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 1:17 PM on February 23 [5 favorites]