Like Grealy, I felt as if my “ugliness”—my divorce—was forcibly made visible to the rest of the world, like a scarlet D tattooed on my forehead, an affront. It felt unseemly to wear my brokenheartedness like a rebuke to other people’s joy. Yet Grealy had found a way to transform her vulnerability into a source of power, turning her “ugliness” into a deeply felt work of art. I wasn’t aiming anywhere that high. I just wanted the sense of exposure to disappear, to not feel like I was displaying my hurt all the time, to not allow it to define me.
The anonymity of Grealy’s class was like a blanket. None of the students were professional writers. I introduced myself as a media executive at Turner Broadcasting, which, alas, I was, still finding it hard to move from marketing into pure editorial work, even as I continued to write for the Economist at night. A number of the students were retirees who wanted to unload what they’d learned or waited a lifetime to say, and they had little to lose. Nor did I. I didn’t need to worry about what any of them thought of me or my writing. I didn’t even bother to try to write well; I certainly didn’t intend to publish what I wrote there, which was a torrent of raw anger and regret and sorrow—everything that had been left unsaid. I wasn’t looking for readers and I absolutely did not want exposure. This was about release.
But shortly after taking the class, I decided to write about divorce again—in a very different way, and this time with a definite eye to readers. I’d recently met another woman my age who was divorced, and our bond was immediate. Listening to this new friend describe her experience, I no longer felt so alone. Soon, other divorced people in their twenties materialized where I hadn’t noticed them before, and I began to seek them out. What did they know that I didn’t know? What had they learned? If I could make sense of what happened to them, perhaps my own story would begin to make sense. And by writing about divorce from this broader perspective, telling other people’s divorce stories, I could reach those going through the same dreadful experience. Maybe I could be their self-help. In the process, I became my own.
I began researching a book about young divorce, interviewing dozens of other divorcées for what would turn into my first book, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony. The people I interviewed were a good deal further along than I was; many were remarried, most at least partially healed. I lapped up their words, taking in their lessons. If they were now okay, then maybe one day I would be, too.
Right after handing in my manuscript at the end of the year 2000, I hopped on a plane to Sicily, where I cycled around the island on a group tour that consisted of four happily vacationing couples and me. On the last day of our bike trip, after three weeks of avoiding all contact with the outside world, I checked e-mail at an Internet café in Taormina. A lawyerly missive informed me that the divorce had finally gone through. It was official.
My life and Bob had been torn apart at the seams. I had swiftly fallen from the Austenian security of destined couple to the Whartonian disgrace of divorcée. But my Book of Books was still potent and full of promise, with only twenty-five of its hundred pages filled in. The binding held fast, despite the visible tears in the back. The pages I had written in before my marriage were unerasable, and the ones written in since were still part of my story. I had lots of blank pages left to go, and they were mine.
CHAPTER 16
Flashman
I Do Not Like Your Books
It’s no secret that we judge other people by their books. This isn’t a matter of snobbery—at least not always—but of taste and affinity and sensibility. Frankly, someone who reads only Middle English poetry and literature in translation would probably put me off as much as someone whose tastes run exclusively to westerns or historical romance. What someone reads gives you a sense of who they are. If you really don’t like someone’s books, chances are you probably won’t like them either.
Here’s my personal test case: The Fountainhead. I have a hard time liking someone who loves it. Maybe if you admire Ayn Rand’s philosophy and her politics but admit the book is terribly written. Or if you hate Ayn Rand’s politics but helplessly fell for the story, or it piqued your interest in architecture at an impressionable moment. But if The Fountainhead is one of your top five books ever, if you think it a magnificent opus of our times, a book every president—every citizen, at least those who matter!—should read, then you will probably not be my best friend.
And people judge me by my own books, for better and for worse. I once had to grit my teeth at a dinner as one person remarked, “You can always tell conservatives by the Paul Johnson on their shelves,” because really, what else could those Paul Johnsons tell you? That you bought one by accident? That you’d read it out of curiosity? That it wasn’t yours but was your husband’s and now was your ex-husband’s and somehow got left behind? That you might not always agree with everything you read, and isn’t that part of the point of reading, anyway? We can misjudge each other by our book titles, too.
I certainly wouldn’t want to be judged by The Fountainhead, which shows up in Bob, but which I read in a state of complete ignorance as bonus material for a class on twentieth-century architecture; I knew nothing of Rand or of objectivism. I even unwittingly showed it off to my French father, Bertrand, an architect but also a socialist, thinking he’d be impressed when I brought it to France to read over vacation.
“How could you bring that piece of shit into our house?” he asked in disgust.
“But it’s about architecture,” I replied weakly. Or was it? Within pages, I was suffering at the hands of its tyrannical main character, Howard Roark, forever plunging a fist into soil and holding forth. The lead female character, Dominique, a woman who naturally took second place to the godlike Roark, kept striding across rooms in long, columnlike gowns. Who knew why this nonsense had even been mentioned in a class about architecture, never mind how it could have sold millions of copies. I trodded on.
A hundred pages later, I was completely with Bertrand, finishing the damned thing only out of spite. I hate-read every last horrible page of The Fountainhead alternating between fury and despair. When it was finally over, I willfully erased it from memory, only the vague echo of Dominique, stomping around in her evening gowns, stubbornly remaining. The book went directly into the trash, where it would never hurt anyone again. Some books are just not good.