After 12 Years, Mary-Louise Parker Finally Wrote About Being Dumped by Billy Crudup While Pregnant
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I haven’t read every letter in Mary-Louise Parker’s new memoir Dear Mr. You, but I did skim all 34 of them in my hunt for a story about one particular person from her life. You see, Parker never names names in her collection of letters, and instead gives each one titles like “Dear Risk Teacher,” “Dear Movement Teacher,” “Dear NASA,” and the titular “Dear Mr. You.”
It’s a unique format for a memoir, but hugely frustrating when you’re some kind of weirdo who’s breathlessly flipping page after page in search of a specific name. Like, oh, Billy Crudup for example. Remember Billy Crudup? They were an item from 1996 to 2003, when he dumped her to be with Claire Danes while Parker was was pregnant with their son. To my knowledge, Parker has never spoken publicly about the breakup (Claire Danes did only recently), so the first thing I did after getting a copy of Dear Mr. You was hunt for the dirt I’ve been waiting 12 years for.
But there was none to be found—only a letter entitled “Dear Mr. Cabdriver,” which is a heartbreaking piece of writing that captures the agony of that notorious breakup without ever dragging Crudup through the mud—or even calling him by name.
In it, Parker recalls screaming at a New York City cabdriver who got lost while driving her to an appointment 20 blocks from her home. This was before GPS devices became ubiquitous and Parker was in no emotional state to be giving directions.
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