story about her in The New York Times that says she’s been fired—along with her husband, the vice president of Bennington—because of her brave stand against tenure. I suspect her firing has nothing to do with her brave stand against tenure, although I don’t have a clue what the real reason is. I go to Bennington and discover that she has in fact been fired because she’s been having an affair with a professor at Bennington, that they taught a class in Hawthorne together, and that they both wore matching T-shirts in class with scarlet A ’s on them. What’s more, I learn that the faculty hated her from the very beginning because she had a party for them and served lukewarm lasagna and unthawed Sara Lee banana cake. I can’t get over this aspect of journalism. I can’t believe how real life never lets you down. I can’t understand why anyone would write fiction when what actually happens is so amazing.
Everything is copy
I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.
I was married to him for two years and eight months
I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”
On the other hand, perhaps you can make this stuff up
So I write a novel. I change my first husband’s cats into hamsters, and I change the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and I give my second husband a beard.
One of the saddest things about divorce
My sister Delia says this, and it’s true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.
But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.
And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.
A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula
Alice Arlen and I have written a script for the movie Silkwood. It’s based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, who worked at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma; she died in a mysterious automobile accident while on her way to meet a New York Times reporter to talk about conditions in the plant. Mike Nichols is going to direct it; he was supposed to direct a Broadway musical instead, but it all fell through because he was betrayed by a close friend who was involved with the show. We will call the close friend Jane Doe for the purposes of this story.
So we all start to work together on the next draft of the script, and Mike keeps suggesting scenes for the movie that involve Karen Silkwood’s being betrayed by a close woman friend. He has a million ideas along these lines, none of which really bear any resemblance to what happened to Karen Silkwood but all of which bear a resemblance to what happened between Mike and his friend Jane. I finally say, “Mike,
Everything is copy
I’m seven months pregnant with my second child, and I’ve just discovered that my second husband is in love with someone else. She too is married. Her husband telephones me. He’s the British ambassador to the United States. I’m not kidding. He happens to be the kind of person who tends to see almost everything in global terms. He suggests lunch. We meet outside a Chinese restaurant on Connecticut Avenue and fall into each other’s arms, weeping. “Oh, Peter,” I say to him, “isn’t it awful?”
“It’s awful,” he says. “What’s happening to this country?”
I’m crying hysterically, but I’m thinking, someday this will be a funny story.
I was married to him for two years and eight months
I fly to New York to see my shrink. I walk into her office and burst into tears. I tell her what my husband has done to me. I tell her my heart is broken. I tell her I’m a total mess and I will never be the same. I can’t stop crying. She looks at me and says, “You have to understand something: You were going to leave him eventually.”
On the other hand, perhaps you can make this stuff up
So I write a novel. I change my first husband’s cats into hamsters, and I change the British ambassador into an undersecretary of state, and I give my second husband a beard.
One of the saddest things about divorce
My sister Delia says this, and it’s true. When we were growing up, we used to love to hear the story of how our parents met and fell in love and eloped one summer when they were both camp counselors. It was so much a part of our lives, a song sung again and again, and no matter what happened, no matter how awful things became between the two of them, we always knew that our parents had once been madly in love.
But in a divorce, you never tell your children that you were once madly in love with their father because it would be too confusing.
And then, after a while, you can’t even remember whether you were.
A man and a woman live in a house on a deserted peninsula
Alice Arlen and I have written a script for the movie Silkwood. It’s based on the true story of Karen Silkwood, who worked at a plutonium plant in Oklahoma; she died in a mysterious automobile accident while on her way to meet a New York Times reporter to talk about conditions in the plant. Mike Nichols is going to direct it; he was supposed to direct a Broadway musical instead, but it all fell through because he was betrayed by a close friend who was involved with the show. We will call the close friend Jane Doe for the purposes of this story.
So we all start to work together on the next draft of the script, and Mike keeps suggesting scenes for the movie that involve Karen Silkwood’s being betrayed by a close woman friend. He has a million ideas along these lines, none of which really bear any resemblance to what happened to Karen Silkwood but all of which bear a resemblance to what happened between Mike and his friend Jane. I finally say, “Mike,
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