"I Think My Husband Is Trashing My Novel on Goodreads!"

Love in the big city.

Original article here: Going Through It, February 21 2024

My take: After “many years of struggle,” the LW has finally published a novel, and it’s doing well, garnering reviews, awards, and sales. Hurray! Her husband, who’s also a writer, held her hand through the struggle part, and is now her biggest cheerleader.

Or so she thought. Now, “for reasons too complicated to get into,” she strongly suspects he’s using anonymous accounts to trash her book online. Alongside the great reviews, it seems, haters have been hating, and she thinks he may be the “main” hater, due to jealousy of her success, which she describes as “attention and accolades he could never dream of,” because “I have achieved something he never could.”

Meow.

The trouble is, she’s “only 85% certain” he’s been secretly trashing her. If she confronted him about her suspicions he’d accuse her of snooping, which she’s done before, and he didn’t like it. So what should she do? At this point the very sight of him makes her sick. She cannot go on.

Going Through It advises her to snoop. But first she should “siphon money” from their joint accounts, and arrange for a place to stay, because if what she fears is true, the marriage is over.

If it isn’t true, and her husband finds out she suspected him, he’ll be furious and they’ll need serious counseling. Going Through It itemizes the questions they’ll need to sort out.

My take? Going Through It should have said this marriage is already over. Even if he hasn’t been attacking her through anonymous accounts, she doesn’t trust him, and it isn’t the first time. She thinks he’s jealous of her professional success—jealous enough and evil enough to sabotage her. And she thinks this because she has contempt for his talent. It all adds up to a gaping crack in the marital foundation, and I don’t see counseling fixing it.

There’s no mention of kids, so though I rarely recommend divorce, I think these two should go their separate ways. But let’s thank them, first, for this fascinating glimpse of a two-writer marriage in New York City. Nice people! They’re the kind of people, actually, whom novelists like them usually write about. They’re very unlike the normally-imperfect people, with recognizable problems, whom the rest of us know and are.

And if anyone thinks I’m dumping unfairly on the New York literati, please shoot me a comment. I have a story to share.

Finally, a message to Going Through It: The similes about the dog and the sister are unnecessary, distracting, and way overextended. It’s as if I were to write: “That’s a crack in the marital foundation, not just a drywall problem…”

Chance this letter is fake: The columnist actually thought it might be, but claims to have verified it.