Dear readers, Today’s letter might require some math: This is the story of one affair, four writers and three ensuing books. Nearly a decade ago, Hannah Pittard discovered her then-husband had cheated on her with her close friend. The fallout was disastrous, as one might expect, but because both Pittard and her ex are writers, the debris of their marriage generated a good deal of literary material. She has revisited the aftermath again in a new book, a work of autofiction called “If You Love It, Let It Kill You,” and she spoke to my colleague Alexandra Alter about it this week. There’s an anarchic sense of humor to the book, and it moves: This is not a story that wallows in the slights inflicted by her ex. Some of the narrator’s observations about her family put me in mind of Patricia Lockwood’s memoir “Priestdaddy” (named for the father whose guitar riffs memorably sound like a terrier howling “Smoke on the Water”). Throughout the novel, Pittard’s narrator questions the ethics of drawing on such events in writing — wondering which party has “custody” of a painful shared history. I understand some readers might find this needlessly prurient. But really, personal scandal and ruin have been the genesis of great literature since humans started putting nib to papyrus. And Pittard’s life reminded me of another book that stemmed from a literary affair: “The Dolphin,” by the poet Robert Lowell. I didn’t know its (frankly outrageous) history until a few years ago, when I learned that Lowell took lines from his ex Elizabeth Hardwick’s desperate letters and dropped them into a narrative of his own making, one that made him out to be a suffering hero rather than a cheat. The collection, naturally, won a Pulitzer. See you next week. Like this email? We hope you’ve enjoyed this newsletter, which is made possible through subscriber support. Subscribe to The New York Times.
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