Someone forwarded us an email that’s apparently been making the rounds lately, in which a prize-winning author notifies some of the grad students in his creative writing program that his lovely wife, also a writer, has left him for one of America’s most prominent captains of industry—so those students can “clarify the issues for any of your fellow grad students who ask,” as “this sort of thing can get wildly distorted pretty quickly.” At which point, he explains in great detail how she’s always found it difficult to live under his shadow, how he rescued her from depression and then she left him for a guy who probably reminds her of the relative who abused her as a child, and how she’s not even going to be this tycoon’s only girlfriend, but that’s okay, because he’s really supportive, and anyway this means she’ll have a room of her own in which to create literary masterpieces. And the author doesn’t mind sharing all this in email, because the couple “will now conduct ourselves as if this is public knowledge,” and, besides, “I am not up to the task of telling this story over and over.” (I’d run longer extracts, but they’d require so much redaction that it’s not really worth it…and, he added a few hours later, the whole thing’s online now.)
With the headers stripped, it’s hard to say with genuine certainty whether or not the email is authentic, although it’s also hard to imagine anybody going to great lengths to pretend to be this particular writer: cui bono?, as the saying goes. At least this particular story, while bizarre, seems slightly more plausible than that rumor about publishing’s latest gay couple that our SoHo colleagues recently revisited…