Modern Love: Why is My Pet Name in the Paper?

I originally glanced right past the word.

Froky? In the paper? Typo. Froky isn't in the newspaper. Froky isn't even a public word. It's a private word, our...shit.

My stomach flooded with acid. It was "Froky." Our secret pet name. Right there in black and white on the front page of the New York Times [2] styles section.

I turned to the "Modern Love" feature and it hit me: My ex-boyfriend had gotten his first byline in the newspaper of record with an essay about me, him, and our shared past.

His essay was an examination of lovers' baby talk. It described pet names as "passwords to a fort of blankets where you and your lover hide and play like children..." He parsed our pet name "Froky" and fondly detailed our "childish games ending in incredible sex."

Then came the twist: Although he was "seduced by (his) own need to play" our infantilizing relationship could not rise to meet adult challenges. While I repeated our pet names "almost like a hopeful, magic incantation," trying "desperately to connect through our shared language of love," he embraced another destiny, "leaving the blanket fort" to live as an adult.

The article was accompanied by an illustration of me, portrayed as a grotesquely oversized, adultly breasted infant girl, arms and legs spread wide. With his back turned to me, a little boy filed away at the iron bars that imprisoned him inside a heart-shaped metal cage.

Without warning from either my ex or the Times, my person and my past had been fictionalized in the Modern Love section. There was just enough fact to make it ring true and more than enough stagecraft to make it fiction, and there was nothing I could do without losing even more privacy and peace of mind than I already had.

The Sunday styles section is one of my guilty pleasures. I always turn to it first, breezing through its amusing fluff before plunging into the paper's more serious offerings. Within styles, Modern Love" is my least favorite feature. The essays are well-written enough, but I hear similar stories from my friends every day. Aside from the occasional "Shamu" instant classic [3], their formula is droningly familiar: Dramatize an intimate personal problem with a vivid emotional incident, dissect it with plenty of juicy details, and soar to a moving personal epiphany.

Tidy in their insights, lawyerly in their adroit summations, the oh-so-sensitive essays had always struck me as fishy. How do the subjects feel, I often wondered? Was the unruly son mad at his mom, or did she clear the essay with him first? Do they fact-check these things? And who gets the final word? Well, soon I would find out.

After our breakup, I somehow knew that my ex-boyfriend—a writer of creative nonfiction—would write about us. I had toyed with the idea of asking him not to. But I never went through with it, for several reasons. First, I was arrogant: I assumed that if he did publish, it would likely be in a smallish press, and I'd never have to know. Second, I was generous: If it helped his career I didn't want to stand in his way; it was his experience as much as mine. Third, I was naïve: I assumed that if he did write, he would veil our most intimate details, honoring our private life together as sacred. Finally, I was just plain intimidated: Although we had talked about remaining friends, he cut off all contact shortly after the breakup. We hadn't spoken for months when we happened to have a strained conversation.

"How's your writing?" I asked. "Doing anything interesting?" "Some stuff," he said. By then he was already working on his big essay.

My favorite novelists—Colette, Jean Rhys, Richard Yates—drew heavily from their lives and lovers for their fiction, sparking literary gossip along the way. But fiction, no matter how transparently based on truth, carries with it a veil of plausible deniability. As the daughter of a journalist, I was raised with the rules of reporting: protect your sources, be objective, check your facts. And as a film director, anyone I shoot must sign a legal waiver authorizing me to depict her physical likeness—or I risk being sued.

In theory creative nonfiction has rules too. Genre pioneer Lee Gutkind explains it [4] by saying "Creative nonfiction writers do not make things up," but use "literary craft in presenting nonfiction—that is, factually accurate prose about real people and events—in a compelling, vivid manner."

What's true for immersion journalism is clearly not true for Modern Love. My ex's essay wasn't fictional enough to warrant changing gory details—the pet name "Froky" was plenty real, as is my little-used first name "Diana." Yet it wasn't factual enough to warrant fact-checking or objectivity; to mention that I was never consulted, warned, or interviewed about the piece is stating the obvious.

From my perspective the article uses a sprinkling of facts to decorate a work of fiction. The essay skews timelines and words, takes events out of context, and characterizes things in a way that could be described as...creative. The overall effect was a complete rewriting of our relationship as I had lived it.

I learned that baby talk had killed our relationship the same way everyone else did—by reading about it in the newspaper. You wouldn't know it from the essay, but my ex had never specifically mentioned this to me as a problem while we were together. The fact that he told the readers of the New York Times more about why we broke up than he had told me left me reeling. But I could hardly write to the Styles editor. Surely my objections would be dismissed as the rants of a scorned woman (a risk I obviously run by writing this article).

To truly attain peace, there was only one thing to do: Write the author. So just as he had done for thousands of strangers, I did just for us: I sat down and wrote my heart out. I revealed things I had never shared when we were together, and I paid homage our past love. I conveyed my shock at his decision to blindside me with the article and my opinion that he had not told the whole truth.

Surprisingly enough, my ex wrote back within the day. He was cool, civil, even kind. He addressed my concerns about the truth by admitting forthrightly: "Of course, my essay is not the truth. It's a version that is emotionally truthful for me...The essay isn't about you or me, and wasn't written for either of us, but only about how people struggle with these things."

As his smooth prose flowed on, it was almost enough to make me doubt my gut. But then I realized: He wasn't writing to me as a man to woman, but as a published writer to civilian reader. He was a professional now, with a nice clip from the New York Times to prove it. He had told his story, and his story had sold.

When the article was first published in 2005, Facebook was just for college kids, Twitter was a gleam in its founder's eye, and "I Bang the Worst Dudes" was a private lament, not a public blog. Today our online personas, blogs, tweets, videos, and Flickrs have made millions of us into semi-fictionalized stars of our own long-running docudramas. As a culture, we all have to reckon with how much is too intimate—and too fictional—to share about ourselves and our loved ones.

It would make a snappy ending to say I've built a fantastically mature relationship with an amazingly playful man. But the facts are messier than that. I thought my relationship with my writerly ex would give me a marriage. Instead, I got dueling essays, which at the time, felt emotionally devastating and now seems darkly hilarious. As much as I told myself I dodged a bullet by ending things with someone who would so brazenly make his private life public, his piece played on my deepest fear that I was so flawed as to be unlovable. And while I knew I never wanted to have the kind of relationship where I had to get my intimate romantic news from the newspaper again, it was hard to forgive myself for letting it get to that point in the first place.

But I have forgiven myself. And my ex. And the too-creative writers of Modern Love and the editors who let them get away with it. And as adroit and tidy and lawyerly as it may sound, I did it by developing a fantastically mature relationship with amazingly playful person—who happened to be myself.

So, I think that I must grudgingly admit that I got a soaring epiphany from a Modern Love column after all.

A version of this column appeared at The Black Table [5] in 2005.

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