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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
How did reconnecting with your exes help you, as you say, "repick" your husband?
When I started the book I was really depressed. My novel wasn't selling, I was dealing with infertility issues, and my husband was being a workaholic. Part of what bothered me was that I thought I was being a really cool wife and saying "Go for it!" -- and there he was leaving and saying, "OK, I'm going for my dream, and by the way you're not allowed to write about the infertility." Every time I'd tried to write about our marriage he'd try to stop me, so I was left with this "I shouldn't, I should be a nice wife" in my head -- but that was stopping me up. I felt like he couldn't not "give me" a baby and control my writing. So writing the book was liberating, fighting with him was liberating. I didn't realize at first that in a certain weird way I left him to write this book: I was preoccupied, I had something else going on, I wasn't waiting up for him to call. But the thing was, when I said fuck it, I'm going to do what I want to do -- and stopped waiting for him to give me what I want -- at some point while I was writing I turned around and saw him and fell in love with him again. I sort of chose him again. Then I sold the book and got happier still.
Did he fall back in love with you?
Well, yeah, now he wants to hang out with me, too, because I'm much more attractive this way -- happy and busy -- than when I was like, "Why are you not taking care of me?" I mean, here's your choice: You come home to a frustrated, angry, obsessed person who resents you, or you come home to a person who's dancing and singing? Success is a total aphrodisiac. We've never been closer. I used to have this idea that I'd never get back to that mad, passionate feeling, but this is even better than first love. It's just amazing. Now he's going around saying he's writing a book called "The Bitch Beside Me."
Has this book been misunderstood as some sort of revenge mission?
Well, there are reviewers in the South who think I'm a brazen hussy who doesn't deserve my nice husband ... But really it's a celebration of what it is about my exes that I adore. The revenge thing has been done -- it's too easy and clichéd. It's not illuminating to play the victim, and of course, if these men are stupid, then what about the women who love them? It made more sense for me to focus on what was fantastic about them. If they're more interesting, then I'm more interesting! No one is just the cad -- even the ones who were cads were smart and successful. I even loved the fact that David was so mean, because come on, what I was doing was pretty insane, and his response gave the whole thing a realistic edge.
Some marriage counselors might argue that getting in touch with your exes --like flirting with a co-worker, say -- qualifies as at least a certain kind of emotional infidelity. Do you think that's what you engaged in?
I did leave my husband while writing the book. I fell in love -- with writing the book. It was like a wild love affair. My heart and soul and brain were elsewhere. But I do think there's a distinction between sleeping with someone and having two weeks of weird e-mail with someone. Of course my friends are joking that when they make a movie out of this the wife is going to have to sleep with one of the exes. I say maybe just a kiss.
Did you ever worry that your personal romantic history might not be interesting to other people?
No. You write best about the things that you are most obsessed with. A good writer can make anything rapturous and exciting. My writing group was like, "You should have gotten old and bitter a long time ago, 'cause this rocks."
What about being pegged as yet another self-indulgent memoirist?
I asked a friend why my novel wasn't selling and she said, "You have no imagination whatsoever -- write a memoir!" She was right. I don't like historical fiction; third-person narratives bore me to death. Naked honesty is engaging. I grew up in this nice Jewish repressed Midwest suburbia where if someone says, "How are you?" and you say, "Not well," it's a shonda [scandal]. At age 12 I was hiding in my room reading Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell and Ted Hughes. The confessional poets were so exciting to me because they really talked. They said something honest and deep, and really grabbed me. People talk about memoirs and spilling your guts as this new thing, but the confessional poets have been doing it for a hundred years. This brilliant advisor of mine told me to "lead the least secretive life that you can." In order to stay happy, healthy and successful, that's been the motto I follow.
