I just finished the poet Maggie Smith’s memoir, “You Could Make This Place Beautiful” and I am SO fascinated by the idea that having a published writer in your life means sometimes their version of the story is the one that gets told. The entire book is her processing her divorce and I was WILD with curiosity thinking about what it must have been like for the ex-husband (and, um, his new partner) to read.
Does anyone have their own favorite example of a memoir that had them thinking about the other story that could’ve been told by the ex, or the sister, or the mother, or the boss, or the neighbor, or the friend… ? Sometimes I finish a memoir and all I can think about is how maybe, because being human is complicated, we’re all inadvertently unreliable narrators…
by lelalubelle
34 Comments
_In the Dream House_. Story of an abusive relationship, both writers, but we’re only reading the one (abused) story.
(Not that I question the abuse, but the fact that both are writers makes you think about it.)
I wish that Sylvia Plath could have responded to Ted Hughes’ Birthday Letters poems about her, written after her death.
Hilary Winston wrote My Boyfriend Wrote a Book About Me after Chad Kultgen wrote The Average American Male (fiction) and referred to her as the “fat-assed girlfriend.”
After reading *Joseph Anton*, I was curious what Salman Rushdie’s ex-spouses thought or would have thought of the memoir. Marianne Wiggins is a writer too, but I haven’t looked into whether she said much about it. Elizabeth West and Padma Lakshmi would also be interesting to hear from.
This is just the deal when you date any type of creative. Singers will write songs about you. Painters will use your image. Writers will based characters off of you. It can be flattering (Annabelle Lee) or infuriating (Hey There Delilah).
I once read a YA book called “Audrey, Wait!” It was about a teenage girl who breaks up with her boyfriend. They were barely together and he wasn’t even nice to her but somehow he wrote an awesome tragic break up song about her that goes nuclear. She had to hear that song every day on the radio, they hired a girl that looked like her in the music video and it made everyone think she was the cold hearted one who broke his heart when in reality he barely cared.
I wonder what Britney Spears, thoughts were when she read the biography her mom wrote about herself. And vice versa.
*Lessons* by Ian McEwan is fiction but a lot of the plot is about a writer character and the protagonist’s differing experience. There’s more to it and it’s not an easy read (lengthy!) but worth it imo.
I think Tara Westover does a great job handling this in Educated. She’s very open about when her recollections differ from other people, and where possible she includes their varying accounts. The one incident with her brother getting burned happened like six different ways according to the six different people who saw it and she’s very up front about who remembers what.
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
On a related note, Mac & His Problem by Enrique Vila-Matas. Mac considers writing a retelling of a book written by a neighbour. Turns out his wife is an ex girlfriend of the neighbour and one of the chapters of the book is about her.
“La Nuit Bengali” and “Na Hanyate” are a pair of novels that might interest you, I think.
*Happens Every Day*, a really raw and revealing memoir by a woman who moved to Oberlin, Ohio with her husband and two little kids when he became an English professor there, before he promptly left her for ANOTHER ENGLISH PROFESSOR. The memoir got picked up by Oprah’s Book Club and was very successful. I always thought it must have been pretty sweet revenge for her, the non-writer of the couple, to write a best-seller… about what an asshole he was.
I went to Oberlin several years later and eventually met the guy. I went over to the very gorgeous house he shares with the other professor (they’re married) one time. He was super pretentious. I always wondered what his thoughts on the whole debacle were.
Not a book but letters to advice columns absolutely!
I think about this all the time. I’m getting a degree in creative writing, so I’m on the other end of it. My girlfriend just thought I was a cute swipe on an app and now she’s got an entire book dedicated to her and pieces about our relationship have been workshopped by my friends and classmates.
Someone I dated wrote a really creepy poem about me and that’s enough, no more writers for me.
This isn’t the exact same situation since it’s friends and not enemies or exes, but I read Lucy Grealy’s Autobiography of a Face (so good) then Ann Patchett’s Truth and Beauty (less good) about her friendship with Grealy.. definitely interesting to see two different perspectives of one life, though I am more sympathetic to Grealy’s perspective for sure.
Grace Petrie’s song “No Woman Ever Wants to be a Muse” also ponders this question. Definitely worth thinking about.
Tempted to post the mean piece of writing my husband’s ex published in a literary magazine while we were first dating, ten years ago. She only mentioned me briefly but it sits in the universe forever and I can’t ever respond.
Beautiful Boy by David Sheff and Tweak by Nick Sheff are two memoirs by a father and son about the son’s meth addiction. They are both good stand alone books but dovetail on each other several times.
I recently read a book called Blow Your House Down. It’s the memoir of a writer who cheated on her husband and the process of their split. It was an epic breakup while their children were growing and her parents (who lived with them) died. I really liked seeing the situation from this perspective but I can only imagine how hard it was for her ex.
Elizabeth Hardwick and Robert Lowell come to mind for me. He used a lot of her private letters to write the Dolphin (and actually edited and repurposed her own words) and he won the Pulitzer for it. A lot of other poets found it cruel, especially since it generously mixed fact and fiction.
(I know it’s so long ago and not my own trauma, but I get irrationally angry thinking about this snooty ass guy who wrote a whole book of poetry about his ex, his daughter, and his new wife by publishing his ex’s letters as poetry except he rewrote them for his own narrative!!!! fuck this guy!!! my literary BEC!)
Here’s more info for the curious: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/marriage-betrayal-and-the-letters-behind-the-dolphin
Poetry, but [Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stag%27s_Leap_(book)) is about her 20 year marriage and divorce after her husband cheated. Phenomenal book. Won the Pulitzer and the TS Eliot prize.
What a great thread and prompt, OP! Adding most of these to my list.
I recently finished Nora Ephron’s Heartburn (fictionalised version of her husband cheating on her when she was pregnant…) and had similar thoughts reading her intro when she said she was threatened with a lawsuit by her ex but it never materialised.
Book of Dreams by Peter Reich is my favourite memoir. He’s the son of a very famous psychologist called Wilhelm Reich who had some unusual ideas and lived a strange life. I have a few of Wilhelm’s books that are on my endless to read list.
Not a book, but a few years ago two comedians (Sarah Pascoe and John Robbins) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival had dueling, highly-reviewed shows about their breakup from each other. It was quite a ride.
I mean not a book example but it always makes me laugh in How I Met Your Mother when Ted sees a movie made by his ex’s husband get made that turns him into a cartoonish villain when Ted was actually the one left at the altar.
Taylor Swift has entered the chat
A little bit off-topic here, but… I loved Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s memoirs. Then I later found out they’d been heavily edited by her Nazi sympathizer husband, Charles Lindbergh, to eliminate anything negative about himself. I sure would love to read her original versions!
It’s just a microcosm of the idea that history is written by the victors. Or, in some cases, the PR firms.
IIRC the siblings to the author of *Angela’s Ashes* took vehement exception to a lot of what is claimed in the memoir. As in, they were never anywhere near as poor as the book claims, their father was not an alcoholic, etc.
So, not his ex-, but his family.
I read A Mother’s Reckoning by Sue Klebold, the mother of one of the Columbine shooters. It was fascinating from her perspective, I almost bought the narrative she was selling about her son being depressed, bullied and misunderstood, about how the other boy was the truly troubled one and her son was just a follower. There’s this part where she finds his writing’s, and then paints this bittersweet realisation that they were both writers. Of course she doesn’t include much of his writing which includes gems such as: I am GOD compared to some of these un-existable, brainless zombies.
Her husband and other kids are estranged from her last I heard.
From music : Richard and Linda Thompson worked together on “Shoot Out the Lights” in 1982 as they were splitting up. There are he said and she said songs on the same record.
Elizabeth Gilbert gets in some digs at her (first) ex in “Eat, Pray, Love” and the follow up “Committed.” He had a book deal for his side of the story, and a title “Displaced,” but it was never published. I would *love* to hear from the second spouse, who she married after EPL but divorced after 9 years.
The entire genre of “how I bravely suffered through my (relative’s) mental illness” books. I hate those. Because if the person actually affected writes a book about it they’re outing themselves as “mentally ill” and therefore exposing themselves to all the bigotry around that, but the relative gets to claim all of the expertise on the subject with none of the risk.
This Modern Love essay by Belle Burden is so scathing and perfectly calibrated revenge art that I almost feel second-hand embarrassment reading it. Honestly, I doubt the ex-husband could dig himself out of this. But I did think, “Man, you made a mistake when you pissed off this woman, knowing that she’s this good a writer. Big mistake.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/30/style/modern-love-married-to-a-stranger.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BE0.Kfzu.m-2npYDoZs_D&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare
I am also wildly curious about the husband’s perspective in “You Could Make This Place Beautiful”!! The book is compelling and beautifully written (I gasped in places!) and finished under (understandable) duress because she has to make money to support herself. I agree that the author was still processing the relationship. I ended the book not fully trusting the narrator.
The biggest gaps I saw were about money, especially in regard to her husband’s job and key role in supporting the lifestyle and career the narrator wanted for herself. One of the narrator’s central arguments is that the husband doesn’t treat her professional ambitions with respect (hypothesizing that he is jealous bc he wants to be a writer himself). Given this premise, it is notable that narrator doesn’t explain the ex’s decision to go to law school and practice law – a decision that goes directly to his state of mind re: professional jealousy. The narrator also doesn’t describe anything about his job or what he likes or doesn’t like about his work. With the narrator complaining bitterly about the ex-husband being emotionally unsupportive of the narrator’s investments in her own career, it is notable that she appears to take ZERO interest in his career satisfaction and ambitions.
But it is clear – especially when they start dividing assets – that his salary was an engine (the other being her labor) that made their lives possible in the way she wanted. The narrator is clear about wanting to live in a certain picture-perfect house in a picture-perfect neighborhood with certain activities and other status markers. I appreciated that. But then she doesn’t connect that back to the husband’s job and that he was so materially supportive of her vision – even though she excluded him from that vision.
Some of the most powerful sections of the memoir to me when the narrator is reckoning with how she’s erased the husband from the narrative of her family’s life. She talks about readers of her poem and other work lauding her as an example to “other” single mothers. The narrator does seem genuinely surprised by this but has enough self-insight to re-read her work and conclude that, Yes, she’s written him out of her family’s life story long before his explicit betrayal. But she doesn’t delve deeply here, probably because the book was due! ⌚️
I hope she writes another memoir in 5-10 years, reckoning more fully with her husband’s role in their lives, the ways he did support her, the ways she didn’t support him, and the stories she willfully ignored (about money, about his professional decisions, about how she shaped their lives, too, etc).
I found it tough reading with so much privilege both people had going into the relationship and throughout the book. Also the cultural insulation of living there and what seems like very little exposure to the outside world outside of work. That being said I commend the author for sharing moments of rash or even reprehensible behavior on her part. Made the story more human.