As someone who wrote about all her horrible breakups and then married my big, tall prince in blue jeans and sneakers when I was 35, I’m over the moon hearing about Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce. And while I’m not a 5-foot-10-inch5-foot -10 inch blond showgirl worth $1.6 billion, and my husband doesn’t even watch football, I’m still overidentifying.
I wrote about my break-ups publicly, and it helped save my career — and our relationship.
He wasn’t thrilled about me publishing my book about break-ups
Not that my guy was as good a sport about it as Kelce has been. Then again, we had already been married for five years and were going through infertility when I told my husband about what I was working on. As a scriptwriter, he kept getting sent for monthlong business trips, and we were arguing about it when I showed him the draft of my book.
It was a sex-drugs-and-ex-boyfriend memoir called “Five Men Who Broke My Heart.” In it, I went back to re-meet my top five heartbreaks of all time to figure out if I’d wound up with the right partner. He liked the conclusion — that he was indeed the other half I’d been waiting for — but not the idea of me going public about my sordid past by publishing it.
While I’d been having ridiculous romances that didn’t work out since I was 13, the benefit of marrying in my mid-30s was that I knew who I was by then. And who I was was a writer.
So I let him know, in a nice way, that I was not the type who’d been sitting in my Michigan hometown waiting for my groom to sweep me off my feet and support me. I’d moved to Manhattan at 20 to chase my dream of being an author. And if he couldn’t handle what I thought might be my magnum opus, I understood and was willing to take the risk for it to see print.
He caught my gist, read the manuscript silently, and requested only two changes — that I use a different name for him and not mention how old he was.
I have no regrets about having shared my breakups publicly
I had no regrets about its publication, especially because it led to several more books that my family hated, and I was so much happier in life — it even reinvigorated my marriage.
The real problem started when a movie studio optioned my debut memoir, and I asked my husband to collaborate on the story he hated, which needed him as the hero.
I did a funny first draft that he admired, except to let me know that having a deep revelation about my past romances in therapy was the opposite of cinematic. “She has to sleep with one of the guys, or it’s not dramatic,” he said to me. “It’s a memoir based on my life,” I argued. “So I don’t want to fictionalize that.”
“If we keep working on this together, we’re going to wind up divorced,” he decided. So that was that.
I ended up letting the studio choose a seasoned TV/film writer. She was dark-haired, Jewish, married, and had a doctor father like mine, so I thought she’d be perfect. Alas, the pages never cohered, and she left the project. Her next project, which won several Emmys, was “The Affair,” about someone who screws up two families by taking a lover.
I’m glad I chose my marriage IRL over the movie version — especially since the book was recently re-optioned, just as we were celebrating our 29th wedding anniversary.
I only hope Taylor and Travis will be as lucky in love as we’ve been.
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