After NYDN gossipers Rush & Malloy reported earlier this week that Gay Talese was working on a memoir about his relationship with Doubleday editor Nan Talese, and that it was going to pull back the curtain on their open marriage, there was some background chatter about exactly what that was supposed to mean, and what each of them has been up to all these years. Well, you can forget it, because Gay has told Russell Goldman of ABC News the Talese marriage is perfectly traditional, although not without its little ups and downs. “Of course I had lust in my heart,” says Talese, echoing Jimmy Carter’s famous comment to Playboy. “Did I ever fall in love with another person? No.”
But the parts in the Daily News item about how the book’s going to focus on his marriage, presumably including the affair previously described in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, and how another journalist is going to interview Nan for sections that tell her side of the story? Those parts are all true.