Five weeks to the day after my debut novel was published, my boyfriend, who is a writer, broke up with me because I am a writer.
I’ve been a writer for a long time. So has he. Until this summer, he was unquestionably the more publicly prominent one. When I told my friends about the breakup, they suggested he was threatened by my success. “This is the oldest story in the book,” my mom said. “Betty Friedan covered it decades ago.”
But that didn’t make sense. 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.
We parted; we dated other people; two years later, we got back together.
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. I promised I wouldn’t exploit our child’s privacy; he worried I would someday change my mind. He wanted more than a verbal promise, which I didn’t know how to provide. I asked him to trust me. Flowers from my British publisher arrived later that morning; my book was published the day before in the UK. I didn’t ask my boyfriend to celebrate that publication. I thought I had already asked for too much. After our fight, my boyfriend left to visit a friend who lived out of state. I sat alone at the dining table, flowers and rosé gummy bears and congratulations card and silent apartment in front of me. I thought: I should take a photo. I should send a thank you message. I should be happy.
It was our second time living together – first in Paris, now New York. My second time moving 3,000 miles to be with him. But here, at least, I spoke the language. I had a job and friends.
My friends lived in Brooklyn, but he wanted to live on the Upper West Side. We moved to the Upper West Side. My book was published. For ten days, he seemed glad to support me. It felt great. And then the dynamic changed. He told me I was taking his supportiveness for granted. He said he considered it his responsibility to take me down a peg. I considered parceling out the good news I shared. I tried to need less.
•••
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.
He didn’t suggest that I give up writing. He purported to support my ambitions, and I tried to come up with justifications for keeping a private journal. I didn’t counter that maybe he should choose his words as if I’d remember them.
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. I’ve thought a lot about these dynamics. I wrote a whole book exploring them. And yet. There I was.
At my book launch, my agent made an offhand comment comparing me to a young Nora Ephron. When he was a teenager, my boyfriend revered Nora Ephron so much that he struck up a correspondence with her, sent her his writing, and stayed in touch until her death, upon which he wrote an op-ed about how much she meant to him. His signed copy of Heartburn is one of his most prized possessions.
In the days after the book launch, he brought Nora up a lot.
“Nora hurt people with her writing, you know,” my boyfriend said.
“Nora was ruthless and didn’t care how Heartburn would affect her children,” he said.
Heartburn, Ephron’s only novel, is a thinly veiled and darkly hilarious story about a woman whose husband has an affair when she’s seven months pregnant.
“People misunderstand her phrase everything is copy,” my boyfriend explained. “It’s really about making yourself the butt of a joke first so that other people can’t do it to you.”
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.
•••
I know how it sounds to suggest my boyfriend dumped me because he’s scared I’ll become like Nora Ephron. You’re thinking: that’s what you’re going with? Or maybe: what’s her name?
The truth is, I’ve gone with that line because it sounds as deranged as the breakup felt. Because the absurdity of it feels safer than alleging that my boyfriend was uncomfortable with my success. That it triggered an ugly competitiveness and insecurity in him, even though we write about different things, even though his own career is going wonderfully. 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. He concluded he’d never feel safe with me due to fear that I might someday write about him. Also, I wasn’t supportive enough of his writing.
When I found myself sad and lonely in the Upper West Side apartment of my now-ex-boyfriend’s dreams, I turned to Nora Ephron. I hunted through her body of work searching for clues, trying to understand who and what my ex-boyfriend loved and feared. I was like an obsessed detective with a bulletin board full of snapshots, but instead of suspects, I had still frames of Meg Ryan. I connected threads until they were tangled in knots.
Prior to this summer, though I had read quite a bit of her writing, I had never seen a Nora Ephron movie. No, that’s not quite right. I saw Julie & Julia in theaters. I know: what kind of person knows the essay panning the egg white omelet but not how Harry met Sally? I wandered Central Park while listening to Nora narrate I Remember Nothing. I watched When Harry Met Sally, then Sleepless in Seattle, then You’ve Got Mail. I watched her son Jacob Bernstein’s documentary, Everything is Copy. I reread Heartburn. I read Richard Cohen’s memoir of his friendship with Nora, She Made Me Laugh. I gaped at the chapter in which Cohen wrote that he personally would have preferred for Nora to keep the whole sordid business of Carl Bernstein’s affair a secret. I read the critic Leon Wieseltier’s Heartburn review, published in Vanity Fair under the pen name Tristan Vox, in which he accused her of child abuse.
I thought, over and over again: Am I crazy? He’s crazy. Who’s crazy?
I thought: actually, I’d love to be like Nora Ephron.
I’m not, of course. I’m a 32-year-old writer who has published two books and is trying to build a literary career. Only once that began to seem like a legitimate possibility did my ex-boyfriend feel threatened by it.
He used to speak mockingly about the glut of novels about women and their feelings as well as the way women speak about feelings in general. “Militarized vulnerability,” he called it.
I struggled to understand what he found so threatening about women expressing their feelings. He used to like that I was a writer. He edited the column I wrote for our college newspaper; he came to a reading for my young adult novel when we were sophomores.
Didn’t he love Nora Ephron? Wasn’t he the one with the autographed You’ve Got Mail poster?
Nora Ephron was the patron saint of militarized vulnerability. She refused shame. Take, for example, her Esquire essay about having small breasts. Society said: hate your body, but don’t talk about it. Nora said: you don’t get to have it both ways.
The more I share about our relationship and breakup, the more vindicated he will feel in his fears. But if I don’t write about it, he succeeds in forcing my silence. If I don’t go into enough detail, the story won’t resonate with people who have experienced similar dynamics, but if I share too much, I run the risk of coming across as bitter and vengeful. I can’t prove I wouldn’t have written about the relationship had it not ended in this way, just like I can’t prove I wouldn’t write about a child I don’t have. It’s a trap.
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.
In real life, Nora Ephron reportedly poured a bottle of red wine on Carl Bernstein after learning of his affair. In Heartburn, Rachel Samstat throws a key lime pie. I’ve never thrown anything. My words are loudest on the page.
Ironically, this is the most personal piece of writing I have ever published.
