Friend, who by day is a New Yorker staff writer, went on his ex-quest as part of the research for his memoir Cheerful Money: Me, My Family, and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor. And his stated goal — to ask them "about whether I was a mild jerk or a total jerk" — seems kind of self-absorbed. In a panel at the Brooklyn Book Festival, Rivka Galchen said memoirists often give away supposedly dirty secrets that they're actually kind of proud of, and being a jerk to ex-girlfriends seems like it may be one of these. At the very least, Friend is convinced he mattered, and he wants to find out how.

Some of his exes are obliging, saying flatteringly cryptic things like "I can't explain what you were to me, Taddles; I've thought about it a lot, but I haven't come to a conclusion." But one, whom he calls Kerry, says, "we slept together, what, twice? Three times?" He says, "it was more like eight," and she responds,

I don't really remember. I know you want to know what you were like, but, hmm — polite, well mannered? The sex was a nonstarter, I do remember that. And I was sleeping with Mel the whole time.

Ouch. But Friend retaliates, asking himself, "had her laugh always sounded that way? I used to love that laugh." He also gets in a little dig by saying that, when he and Kerry were hooking up, "I was also pursuing a woman named Sarah, who was prettier and much less interesting." There are ways to compliment a woman's personality — this is not it. To top it off, Friend opines,

Some of Kerry's implacability, her artist's selfishness, had surely been there in college. And if it had grown since then, it wasn't because I'd let her down or broken her heart.

Kerry appears to have moved on quite handily, but Friend is still reassuring himself that she's not that great, and that it's not his fault. This appears to be a pattern. Of another ex, Melanie, he writes,

I found myself wondering whether her hair would still be curly — a better, happier look, I thought — if we'd kept on. Probably not a sufficient reason to stay together, though, simply to keep the blow dryer at bay.

I'm sure Melanie would agree. Friend's wife — that would be Amanda Hesser, Times writer, founder of a new food website, and author of a book about her romance with Friend — was apparently not thrilled with his ex project, but he's mean enough about the women that she needn't have worried. The real hazard Friend encounters is that when you break up with someone, you often have to convince yourself that they kind of sucked in order to move on. You create an especially crappy version of your ex, the flipside of the glossy one you had when you were in love. And if you set this crappy version down in, say, a national magazine, you risk making yourself look immature and self-involved — and insulting another person in the process. Luckily, Kerry doesn't seem to give a shit.

Vogue [Official Site]

I come from a family in which my dad's ex-wife is one of my mother's closest friends, and various former live-ins and lovers from their single days make up a large and un-self-conscious part of their social circle. Maybe this is a legacy of the 70's, but jealousy was never a part of the equation: the openness precluded it. And as a result, this seemed normal to me: that anyone you'd loved and who'd been a big part of your life sort of automatically joined a large extended family. You know, like in a Woody Allen movie!

So when I began having boyfriends, it went without question (for me) that their exes would be in their lives, just as mine would. Mind you, not every high school girlfriend or college fling, but those with whom one had lived and shared a lot, and with whom one stayed in contact. As a rule, the people with whom my boyfriends had enjoyed this level of intimacy were not psychos. And indeed, I always took the view that they were, for the most part, a pretty self-selecting population. The guys to whom I was drawn were always so idiosyncratic and peculiar that the fact is I felt a tacit bond with anyone else who appreciated them, and felt pretty sure we'd get along.

It seems they didn't feel this way at all. Indeed, it seemed I was crazy. Also, naive. It seemed it was not the done thing for current and ex-girlfriends to get drinks together, and that the exes often found these overtures strange and creepy. As did the boyfriends. Further, it developed that my exes' new girlfriends didn't, naturally, want to meet me - which I found baffling and obscurely hurtful. I understood, intellectually, that this was new terrain we were navigating: that a few generations ago, no one had to navigate a landscape populated by the living ghosts of multiple pseudo-marriages, where no intimacy is really new, where comparisons and minefields and Google searches lurk. So often, you know things about these people, and it had always seemed better to me to strip matters of their mystery than live in some kind of Rebecca-style hall of mirrors.

And yet, I was resolutely insensitive to anyone else's feelings on the matter. And my boyfriend's words came as a shock: creepy? I, in my openness and friendliness, was creepy? I wasn't stalking or obsessing or hating like some people I knew; I just wanted to be friendly and normal! But then, as I was to learn, there is no "normal" and if there were, I probably wasn't it. In my hubris, I had been imposing my own feelings on these poor women. (Although, that said, when someone's girlfriend tracked me down, we had a big commiseration session on why people are so weirded out by this sort of thing.) I have since schooled myself sternly in empathy. Although there are, I think, situations when friendliness is apropos: if, say, the two of them have a functional, friendly relationship? Talk? Get together? It would seem to me very odd that you never put in an appearance, for any number of reasons that have nothing to do with my deeply held creepy ones. And the truth is, I recently watched Hannah and Her Sisters and Everyone Says I Love You in quick succession, and, seriously? What is with Woody Allen's character just hanging out with his ex-wives all the time? Why doesn't he grow up, learn boundaries, and get his own life? There really is nothing wrong with that.

Of course, if you're in the habit of mining the wreck that is your personal life for your work, it's fairly difficult to never talk about an ex. Is it particularly mature to make fun of an ex because of his name or because he didn't know better than to try to face fuck you or because he kept standing you up? Probably not. On the other hand, I was writing those stories for what they said about me, and my relationships, and my own idiocy — and, because, now, they're funny to me. They're not intended to be mean-spirited, or floated out there as revenge or even to put me in a positive light. I puked on a guy named Ralph, I lacked the common sense to stay out of a sexual situation with an inexperienced and inattentive guy, I allowed someone to stand me up more than once. Don't you see, it's all about me!

The real problem, though, is that, like too many writers — in addition to having a strange sense of humor and way too much time to think about my failed relationships — I'm also an incredible narcissist... which is apparently how I turned a post about someone slagging on his ex into a post about me doing the exact opposite thing.

Man Who Slammed Ex Online Faces Libel [CBS News]

Earlier: What Name Could You Never F*ck?
There Ought To Be A Sign
Why Am I Supposed To Date Older Men, Again?

It's sort of easy to mock Gullickson, but who among us hasn't descended into the throes of post-relationship craziness now and again? I've been with the same person for three and a half years, and while I don't really give a hoot about any of my exes, I still look at their current girlfriends on facebook and make snide comments about them in my head. Obviously, that's an entirely different animal from actively trying to ruin someone else's wedding, but where do you draw the line between normal ex-related pettiness and total insanity?

Second Thoughts on Love Lost [NY Times]

P.S. No animals were drugged in the making of this video.