INTRODUCTION

This book began as a response to a question frequently posed to me by readers of an essay that I wrote for Adam Ross and the Sewanee Review in 2017. In the essay, I discussed my husband’s affair with my best friend, and I confessed to having previously mined my own failing marriage for material for my third novel, which tells the story of a couple in crisis.

The confession came naturally, in part, because it wasn’t the first time I’d cannibalized my life for material. In grad school, my peers constantly accused me of writing personal essays disguised as fiction by way of the third-person pronoun. “This is you,” they’d say. “This is you. This is you. This is you.” Except on one occasion, when I wrote about an intimate revelation regarding a classmate’s husband, one she’d made a few weeks earlier, over drinks, and to several members of the workshop. “This is me,” the classmate said bluntly, and everyone in the room, most especially me, marveled with disappointment at my overstep.

Later, thinking I’d learned my lesson and while writing my first novel, I stole heavily from my childhood—but from my memories of my childhood: of basement antics and pool party pranks and locker room gossip. I stole from remembered conversations—sometimes overheard and often misperceived—as well as from the shameless rumors we children told and retold about ourselves and each other, each recitation enjoying a new embellishment courtesy of our youthful imaginations—imaginations that had no anchor in honesty or ownership.

This sort of cannibalistic approach to fiction comes with its fair share of interpersonal risk. In 2011, my grandfather killed himself on a back porch in Atlanta, and that suicide became the inciting incident for my second novel. There are people who have never forgiven me for the trespass. Nor am I alone in my intrusions into the lives of those close to me: Joseph Heller famously alienated his children, who accused him of lifting their conversations with him verbatim. (“What makes you think you’re interesting enough to write about?” was his response.) James Salter based the central characters of his masterpiece Light Years on a pair of dear friends, shocking them upon the book’s publication. There is always the danger, of course, that writers will become ensnared by the autobiographical details they are trying to use and misperceive the truth.

This may or may not have been the case with my third novel, which was published the same week I discovered my husband’s affair with my best friend. In many ways, I felt the ultimate failure was mine: over the course of several years, I chose to focus on my art instead of on my marriage. Though my husband was the one to cheat, I was not entirely blameless. My disloyalty to our union—privileging our conversations as fodder for material, for instance, rather than investing in them as a means to repair—preceded his own.

For nearly a year after my divorce, I worked on the Sewanee essay with Adam, and the process was an undeniably therapeutic one. By the time it was published, I felt I’d turned a corner: I didn’t cry when my ex-husband called me; I didn’t cry when I cooked dinner alone; I didn’t cry when my mother asked if I was eating enough or working out too much or if I’d started vomiting again. I didn’t even cry on the one occasion I agreed to have drinks with my ex-husband and my former best friend.

By then, I only ever felt a jab of pain when people would ask, having read my essay, “But what’s the real story? What really went on between the three of you?” What they wanted to know, as one especially candid reader put it, were “the nasty bits.” In other words, they wanted to know the details. But also, I think they wanted to know how those details could be shuffled and reshuffled into the characters’ different perceptions of reality. To be honest, so did I.

A healthy habit or not, it’s in my nature to play conversations over and over in my head. In the pages that follow are the conversations I remember most vividly from the ten years I spent with my husband. Taking great liberties and very likely getting much of it wrong, these imperfectly recollected exchanges (in person, by phone, and by text) are between my husband, my best friend, my sister, other friends, parents, counselors, and me. Sometimes they are imagined from whole cloth (as when I attempt to reconstruct the discussion between my husband and best friend that might have led to their initial infidelity), and sometimes they are recalled as clearly and honestly as if they’d taken place just last night (as when my husband suggested we have a baby in order to curb our excessive drinking habits). Collectively, these conversations are meant to provide the substance and context of a marriage that was destined to fail from the beginning and a friendship that was doomed to end in betrayal.

What began as a response to curious readers has since morphed into an investigation into the intersection of memory, self, honesty, and personal accounting—an investigation that sharply questions the legitimacy, ownership, and accuracy of personal and shared memories. During our divorce and as we went about the arduous task of uncoupling our lives, my husband and I had plenty of opportunities to argue. We had plenty of opportunities to rehash how and why we’d gotten where we were. Most maddening to me during these arguments—more even than his infidelity—was his insistence on a version of our marriage that completely clashed with mine. Most maddening to him, he told me later, was my unwillingness even to entertain his point of view.

After our divorce, I didn’t immediately stop hearing my husband’s voice in my head or stop guessing how he might respond to something I’d read or heard or said if he’d still been in the room to hear me say it. I didn’t overnight stop thinking of things that might turn him thoughtful or make him laugh. Especially when I took our dog for walks alone, I thought about him, thought about the conversations we weren’t having; and I allowed myself to invent both sides—not as two people still together, but as two people who’d spent a decade together and who were now suddenly apart. Maybe this is just an elaborate way of admitting that I missed him and that, in missing him, I did what I do naturally: I wrote him down. Without his permission, I re-created him, trying to conjure up this new version of him with which to have a final exchange.

I’m a firm believer that in the particular, we find the universal. In what follows, I’ve concentrated on a string of echoing events that happened to a particular person, this person. But my hope is that by watching one individual’s detailed mental maneuvering, readers might begin to ask themselves more intimate and provocative questions about their own decision-making processes and their own relationship to experience, accuracy, and the intentions of memory: Is there a legitimate way to own a recollection? What is a shared memory? When is the personal too personal?

N.B.

With the exception of mine, my sister’s, Andy’s, and the dog’s, all the names have been changed. Dates, details, and places have also been altered in some instances.



1.

Elmer died in December, a year and a half after the divorce. A few weeks later, I sold the car I’d owned with my husband (the practical hatchback that could accommodate his many amps and guitars, not to mention the dobro) and bought myself another MINI Cooper. A month after that, I sold our house and most of the furniture in it—the bed, the dining room chairs, the kitchen table, footstools, planters, a set of vintage lockers, a much-loved leather sofa, and a neon light that read JUST SAY BULL, which had been the centerpiece of a story-and-a-half wall of books, one of the first purchases we’d made together in Lexington.

Everything I’d fought to keep—house, car, dog—was gone. Patrick was gone, too, by then, back to Charlottesville, where he’d moved to be with Trish, and where Trish, abandoning her husband and New York, had moved to be with him.

What weren’t gone were the memories. I didn’t want them, didn’t cultivate them, didn’t linger on them or go after them, but there they were. Little triggers everywhere.

At the closing on the house, for instance, the buyer said suddenly of its street, “Aurora! I’ve always loved the name Aurora!” and I immediately remembered Trish’s response when we told her we’d bought a house in Kentucky.

“A street called Aurora,” she’d said. “How romantic!”

I remembered marveling at her exclamation—How romantic!—finding it strange, enviable even, that she could locate romance in something so quotidian as a street name. Those words bubble up even now, so many years later, when I’m least expecting them—washing the dishes, folding the clothes—How romantic! I’ll think, and there she is again, almost as if she never left.


Copyright © 2023 by Hannah Pittard