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

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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 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, 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.