Double X's new column, "Modern Love Revenge," is potentially pretty genius - provided, that is, the subjects are as prone to soul-baring as the original authors. Although Audrey Bethel, whose lack of communication causes mom Maynard to break into her email and discover a scary situation, you may recall - seems perfectly ready to go public, albeit in more diplomatic terms. Bethel's response is more measured and less personal than her mother's - but there are plenty of small digs in there.

It's pretty clear from Audrey's - and her mom's - pieces that living material is no novelty in the Bethel-Maynard house. As Audrey says, "My mother, Joyce Maynard, writes for a living, so I have spent my life learning that an event recounted by one person might not sound like the same event when recounted by another person, even if she was there, and witnessed it, and was at the center of it. It can be frustrating for me to let my mother own her stories-and by proxy, the stories of the people close to her." (As the daughter of two writers, I should point out here that this isn't typical. It probably is, though, of writers who write regularly about their own first-person.) "Over the years, my mother has often written works of nonfiction detailing my family's life and times-but never had anything so intimate or inherently mine to tell been the topic of her writing."

Here, Audrey reproduces the oddly loaded email her mom sent her before running the piece.

Dear Aud, I have written an essay that I need to show you. An editor at the New York Times would like to publish it, but I will not do this unless you can feel alright about this. I am guessing that if you could have chosen, you would prefer to have a mother who did not, as I do, write about her life. Though of course, if that were the case, you would have a totally different mother. And be a different person yourself.

And if that, in context, seems passive-aggressive - kind of defiant and impotent (how did "The New York Times" see this essay before Audrey granted her permission? Magic?) - check out this line: "I knew her primary purpose was not to write an academic piece to raise social consciousness, but I still felt strongly that the original draft of my mother's piece perpetuated certain stereotypes and assumptions. I knew how much she wanted me to tell her to go ahead with the piece, especially since it would be good publicity to coincide with her new book coming out."

Holy underlying tensions, Batman! In the end, Audrey, obviously a good sport, works with her mother to edit the piece into a compromise that acknowledges the social issues close to her heart. But her ambivalence, in the article, is palpable. And if this retort isn't an act of veiled aggression, I've never seen one. Sure, we know these people only by what they've shown us - maybe it's no relation to who they are in real life. But as characters in a public drama, they're choosing to paint quite a fraught picture. It would be interesting to see the exchange in which Audrey informed her mother of this piece - if in fact she did. Having made her, by her own admission, who she is by dint of her oversharing, Maynard could hardly object.

[Image via JoyceMaynard.com]

Modern Love Revenge: Joyce Maynard's Daughter Gets Her Turn To Speak[XX]

Related: Joyce Maynard Looks Back On Life?

Don't get me wrong, I often enjoy Michelle Slatalla's cozy domestic column. But this one? Not so much. In this installment, Slatalla's eldest daughter has left for college. Or, I guess, her second year.

Everybody makes a fuss when you send a child off to college for the first time. You’re expected to feel pangs when you separate from a freshman. But that turns out to be not so bad, because those feelings are tempered by the excitement of propelling a child to an entirely new phase of life. Waving goodbye at the end of sophomore winter break turns out to be much harder.It’s kind of like how your friends throw a big birthday party to cushion the blow when you turn 30. But then nobody shows up for 31 or 33 — which, arguably, are much worse — and you’re left to face the growing realization that you’re headed for 41.It is dawning on me, as time goes by and Zoe starts to come home for shorter periods and to call less often, that the center of gravity of her life has shifted away.

Yes, change is hard. Children leaving, as has been noted a time or two, is a time for melancholy recollection on the sunrise-sunsetting of the years. Of course, it's a lot easier now than back in the day! Cue the post-Boomer self-congratulation:

Stephanie Coontz, a family historian, said that luckily our generation of parents may not need to [cling to their kids], thanks to our enlightened child-rearing techniques that allowed children to begin asserting their independence at an early age. 'There may have been more tension when they were young because they weren’t being controlled as much as previous generations,' she said, 'but what that also means is that they’ll be more willing to come back to you later, as friends.'

Maybe I'm in a cranky mood, but my golly! We should be so lucky! I am not normally of the starving-children-in-Africa-clean-your-plate school of illogic, but does this lady have any idea how many children would love to go to school, how many, many generations couldn't? Mourning their loss in the home is rank luxury! Which is, of course, a deeply unfair line of logic: Slatalla's emotions are valid, as are those of everyone who's experienced the same thing. I think what rubs is the myopia of the piece: Slatalla says she sympathizes with famed "helicopter parent" Sara Roosevelt, but uses this as a jumping-off point, not for a real look at changing mores, but as no more than an examination of her own emotions. (After all, it's not like that level of attention worked out so badly for Franklin: discuss?) Maybe that's what's frustrating: you feel there's a chance for something interesting and instead she retreats into her own experience, which is, at the end of the day, pretty much like everyone else's. Is that a crime? Of course not. But it's still a disappointment.

My Universe Loses a Star [New York Times]

Don't get me wrong: this is an interesting piece. It's the account of a scientist's breast cancer relapse, and it's brisk, mordant and absorbing.

I had a fresh case, in my previously unscathed breast. The new occurrence was local, meaning no multiple surgeries, no chemotherapy. This time I had the very best form of breast cancer. Way to go!

Whereas before the author, Sally Hoskins, took comfort from a support group of similarly afflicted women, this time she wants to go it alone, treating the relapse with a strictly-business matter-of-factness.

But now, a decade and a half later, roads had been taken, choices had been made. This time the idea of a support group didn’t even occur to me. Breast cancer? I knew the drill.

However, she and the other women end up bonding over the pain-dulling effects of Xanax (necessary to get through the onerous "wire insertion"), which the sisters-in-arms share generously with each other.

Yes, I was buoyed in part by my Xanax-filled water wings. But what really kept me afloat was the one thing I had mistakenly believed I could do without: the loving care that flows freely among female strangers even in short-term groups like this one, established within minutes and disbanded just as quickly, only to re-form with a whole new cast in the next waiting room, and the next.

Nice, interesting...but whither the modern love?! Even defining the term pretty loosely, this seems to fall a little short of what the poets speak of. The closest we get is various unspecified references to what would seem to be Philip Nobel's infamous Elle essay.

After starting my IV, the nurse ushered me back to the public waiting room, where I grabbed a copy of Elle magazine with the cover line: “I Left My Wife for a Younger Woman ... and Ruined My Life.” I wanted details. I needed to hear how this man learned his lesson. But I was still searching for the article when — Step 3 — they called me to the inner sanctum waiting area...I started feeling a familiar camaraderie but resisted, saying: “If I’d known we’d be here so long, I’d have brought Elle. Did you see the article about the guy who ..."

And then it dawned on me: Personal essays referencing personal essays! This is some meta shit, kids! And using the essay as a means to avoid intimacy! Further, playing with ideas of love, self-love, relative love and degrees of pain! Is "modern love," then, at the end of the day no more and no less than the sum parts of personal experience, relationships no more than the filter of another individual's amour-propre? Is this seemingly not-at-all-really-related-to-any-kind-of-love...in fact a deft piece of literary sleight of hand?! Or... am I overthinking?

The Kindness, and Xanax, of Strangers [New York Times]

Earlier: Elle Writer Didn't Plan To Be The Poster Boy For Male Recklessness

This week's "Modern Love" essay comes to us from one Karen Karbo, a writer who manages to trivialize very real issues of money, identity and power with the narcissistic lens of her own experience! Karen's a woman who, while she took education and a career as her due, never envisioned herself supporting a family, and unwittingly fell into this role. It's actually a fascinating topic, the unconscious double-standard that exist for a lot of women who, while they admit it or not, actually want to have it all in a way the women's movement never conceived of — the career, the opportunities, but also the security of the traditional gender breakdown, and the secret resentment this has bred.

"While I couldn’t imagine being my mother, vacuuming on Monday, dusting on Tuesday, etc., neither did I see myself as a high-powered earner. I switched majors from journalism to physical therapy to film. I got good grades, which was something I knew how to do, but beyond that ... well, there was no beyond that.

Treated sensitively, this is actually something I'd love to see addressed.

"Treated sensitively" are the operative words. Instead we get Karbo's relationship with a chauvinistic sugar daddy type, then her two marriages, all reduced to blithe caricature. First there's an aimless deadbeat hubby who lets her run the show while he finds himself. Karbo resents this, but recognizes the benefits.

If I had been dependent on James financially, would I have walked out so easily? It brings up a question that can only be posed uneasily: Is it better for the longevity of a marriage if one party (usually the woman) feels financially trapped?

While this is an interesting line of inquiry, it's couched in such myopic terms that it's hard to move beyond the specifics. You're left thinking, in theory? Maybe. In your case? I don't care. She deems her next husband, a blue-collar exotic, "the cuddle bum." When he quits his job, her breadwinning role is made official; he becomes a house husband. But he's crap at it.

When we divorced, he wanted alimony, child support and the house — the house that was purchased with my money, in my name. During one of our last conversations, I wept with incomprehension. He wanted my house? Whatever happened to the way people divorce in the movies, where the husband packs a bag and moves into a sad hotel, leaving his wife (whom he supported) in the house?

Ultimately, Karbo learns (because, despite the incredibly specific nature of her experience, she seems to tacitly feel that there's a universality to them) that "for those of us predetermined to be breadwinners, it’s more fun to date a man than to marry him. We understand that the more people we have under our roof, the more it costs us. I am appalled by how unromantic this sounds, but there you have it." There you have it! Karbo has taken on some very complex issues, given them a cursory and highly personal treatment, and come to a flippant conclusion that a lot of people — ie, anyone who's managed to make a marriage with all its financial complexities and power struggles, work — might find both facile and inaccurate. In her world, guys are apparently total deadbeats or archaic chauvinists - and so, nothing more exists. Is it more fun for you, Karen Karbo, to date than marry? I daresay. A good personal essay should illuminate a larger truth through a specific story. A poor one is just a narcissist assuming her experience applies to the whole world. This exercise in disappointment most certainly falls into the latter category.

The Accidental Breadwinner [NY Times]

The author and her boyfriend's mom, Mary, originally have the slightly wary relationship typical of mothers and girlfriends, but John's death brings them together by necessity and inclination.

I’m not sure she even liked me until John collapsed and so did our worlds. But I was one of the two or three people she phoned before grabbing the mink, and because she had no other family who could arrive before the next day, I was the one who sat with her a few hours later as the neurologist told us that John had only a 1 to 2 percent chance of survival, never mind recovery.

The two maintain a friendship for the next twenty years; neither woman really finds another great love, but their relationship deepens.

At her 90th-birthday luncheon, she introduced me by saying, “And this is my daughter.” I was too stunned to react outwardly but inwardly rejoiced. And in some ways, I was a better daughter to her than I was to my own mother. But then, we had never hurt each other the way mothers and daughters inevitably do.

What is nice about this essay is not merely the pleasant contrast to the column's usual myopic bill of fare; rather, it's that it seems to arise from a point of real emotion rather than the smug complacency of an otherwise figured-out existence. It's also refreshing to see another take on the "possessive mother in law" cliché — especially as the noxious-looking reality show Mama's Boys (in which mothers apparently find potential mates lacking) gears up. The trope of women competing over the man in their lives is a tired and depressing one; one of the more poignant aspects of this essay is the implication that, had John lived, such a close bond between the two women might not have been possible. Even those of us who've enjoyed warm relationships with a significant other's mom are told by society that we're somehow lucky; the expectations are somehow stacked against closeness. Maybe this is inevitable, but it's nice for an essay like this to remind us of how much of that is construct, and to what extent loss strips these away.

Faithful To His Memory, And His Mother [New York Times]

Earlier: The In Laws: Other Women Are Supposedly Our Worst Enemies

I suppose it's telling that Modern Love's best-known piece was by a woman who found a way to train "the American husband" as one would any dolphin, killer whale, or baboon. (It became a book.) So perhaps it's unsurprising that this week's essay—which might be headlined "I Hate Sex And Told My Husband To Eat It"—boils over with unusually dunderheaded self-justification and the perpetuation of negative stereotypes about women's sexuality. (As in, that most of us would be happier making stained glass than makin' it.)

The unhappy marriage is Modern Love's richest vein for material, a thick, gristly sinew that holds the feature together even as it sticks in the reader's craw. Why was reading Lauren Slater's non-apologia for her intimacy-avoiding ways such an unpleasant interruption to my Sunday brunch? Let's see:

I met and fell in love with my husband for his beautifully colored hair, his gentle ways, his humor. We were together many years, and so sex faded. Then we decided to marry.

I'm distrustful of people—especially writers—who can't seem to find any way of expressing their love aside from the usual lazy clichés about appearance and that old stand-by, the sense of humor. And don't you love the way Slater works in that bit about how the union was sexually threadbare before marriage was in the offing—a subtle way to reframe her low libido as an issue of hubby's due diligence.

Predictably, almost as soon as the engagement ring slid onto my finger, I fell in love with someone else. I fell madly, insanely, obsessively in love with a conservative Christian man who believed that I, as a Jew, was going to hell. We fought long and hard about that, and then had sex. This is so stupid, it pains me to write about it.

Not as much as it pains me to read about it! In another, humbler essay, this might be the moment where the writer explains how a series of errors in her judgment led her to reflect, re-evaluate, and change. Not so Slater, whose breathtaking entitlement spawns only the following self-justification: "This affair, I sensed, was necessary for me to move forward with my marriage. It was a test." Fooling around on her fiancé—Slater feels the need to point out she and the other man never technically had intercourse, "though we did just about everything else"—was only going to help her relationship, silly! Because as soon as the passion faded with the fundamentalist fuckbuddy, Slater would be free to run home to her waiting partner, secure in the knowledge that for her, exciting sex past the six-month mark of a relationship was an impossibility, so she might as well get hitched to the dude with the pretty hair.

The parts of the essay where she writes about some of the times she has had real desire—for the Christian, and for the man she lost her virginity with, who is described, many times more evocatively than is the father of Slater's children, as "a broody bad boy who had a muscular chest and a head roiling with glossy curls"—must be infuriating for her long-suffering husband to read. Who wants to know their spouse can still summon a tactile memory of their first sex partner's (roiling!) curls, while loudly claiming perfect and permanent marital frigidity in the pages of a national newspaper?

Slater acknowledges the pain having mismatched sex drives has caused. "It makes my husband miserable and cold and withdrawn, and it is so unhappy, living this way," she writes. But at the same time, she is unwilling to admit her lack of desire is any kind of problem. Throughout the essay, she casually denigrates the physical act of love: "I have never much liked sex because, when all is said and done, there’s not much to like." She even asks, "What is the big deal?" before concluding that, "For me, sex does not even come close to the thrill of scoring gorgeous glass for a window I will use, of hearing the grit as the grains separate and the cut comes clean and perfect."

Curiously, she admits to the stereotypical cocktail of bodily shame and simple irrationality that men have always alleged of "frigid" women, but Slater doesn't seem to sense how deeply sad that is. She writes of her first orgasm, which came courtesy of the guy with the Botticelli hair, "This was softer, gentler, full of a wide-open love, a deep falling-down love. When it was over, I hated him. I hated that man (that boy, really). The intimacy was too much, too wrenching and shameful." (Emphasis added.) What's pathetic is she doesn't seem to realize how downright sad—not to mention self-defeating—that misdirected hatred is. There is absolutely nothing shameful about pleasure. There is nothing shameful about love. And there is definitely nothing shameful about our capacity for intimacy: the ability to share the spectrum of desire with another person, without guile or gamesmanship or internalized shame, is part of what makes us human. Cloaking personal problems in obfuscatory reminiscences about other men and the rhetoric of rights seems childish in comparison.

Slater seems to want badly to convince us of this idea that never wanting to be sexual with her husband is not a pathology, but a legitimate part of her identity. That it's "fair" for her to withhold sex within her marriage, to make a point of not enjoying it, to be as close to asexual as someone who admits to occasional blinding bouts of desire can be. But it reads like one big cop-out; the idea that one partner's low libido is something the other must simply grin and bear might have more merit if that partner didn't simultaneously confess to a much more garden-variety personal problem: wanting to fuck other people instead.

Modern Love: Why I Love My Husband But Not Sex [NY Times]

So, the wife goes into labor, the dad freaks and calls 911, while he's on the phone, she has their daughter in the bathroom. "In the months that followed, I often told the story and would pay tribute to how Leslie gave birth. I reveled in our miracle, a testimony to a mother’s independence, a father’s irrelevance and the magic of our relationship," he explains. They listen to the 911 call all the time, which is all fun and games until their marriage falls apart and the tape becomes imbued with all kinds of sinister significance

It was perhaps fitting that the first woman I dated post-Leslie found the story appalling — despite my selling it, as I always did, as a kind of crazy and comical adventure. “It must have been terrible for you,” she said. Her response caused something to snap in me, and I opened a door to a closet. Inside was raw anger over what had happened that day.

Although this mythical incident becomes the fulcrum of the narrative, it's kind of hard, from the reader's perspective, to really understand the rage here. Is an at-home birth scary? Of course. Are the breakups of marriages and families devastating? Always. Maybe it says something terrible and jaded about me or our society that, while I'm sure this tape was a Big, Significant Deal to the author, this synecdoche doesn't serve to illuminate anything about his marriage nor about divorce and masculinity generally. I'm kind of left thinking, "and...?" Does a personal essay need to include some universal truth? Of course not — but good writing kind of does. The guy says near the end, "I hate that tape. And I know it’s amazing. It reminds me of how I failed to display any heroism, how I did the best I could in a tight situation — and how Leslie didn’t need any such help." Um, that's good, I guess. Thanks for sharing?

Have That Baby, Dear. I’ll Just Watch. [New York Times]

So, some child in their small elementary school carves "I love Sarvis" on the bathroom stall. No one will admit to it. So the kid's mom, Kate Krautkramer, the elementary school writing teacher, takes matters into her own hands.

"So I tried my own approach: greeting the girls in Sarvis’s class with different facial expressions, first accusing, then questioning, in the hope that someone would crack. Whoever Graffiti Girl was, she was impudent: a little child who obviously shouldn’t be allowed to say anything about love. She didn’t know Sarvis the way I knew Sarvis, no matter what the bathroom wall proclaimed. All of this I communicated

Then things get...weird. "I started using the vandalized stall exclusively. After a few weeks, I even started thinking of it as Sarvis’s bathroom. I was haunted by the comment a friend made following the birth of her second son. 'He’s very cute,' she said, 'but I’m worried. It seems like sons, no matter how much you love them, just grow up and leave you to marry someone you hate.'"

Well, apparently she "hates" all the little girls in his class. She imagines one "turning her 18-inch hips just so for the very first time, or taking a try at batting her lashes." While initially the author expresses some semblance of concern over her son's embarrassment, or the destruction of school property, the essay quickly becomes nakedly Oedipal.

"Who among them could possibly fail to recognize that her third-grade infatuation was no match for my perfect, clear memory of Sarvis’s 3-year-old voice singing 'Fuzzy and Blue' along with Grover? [People still like Grover? We thought Elmo had replaced him. - Ed.] Graffiti Girl didn’t even know where I kept Sarvis’s immunization record. She didn’t have a clue about how much he liked lemon pepper on his spaghetti. She couldn’t 'heart' Sarvis more than I 'heart' Sarvis. Every week when I got to school, I stepped into the 'I love Sarvis' stall as if it were a sacred chamber. Eventually, the bathroom wall became a metaphor for my own love for Sarvis: industrial, resistant, indestructible. One day I went in and traced the little girl’s writing with my finger. I traced my son’s name and the original heart, which was dented in places. As I traced her words, however, I started to identify with her. Putting my hand in the middle of her carved heart, I commiserated — 'I love him, too.'"

In the end, of course, the mom decides to be reasonable towards the anonymous little girl — 'no matter that she was using her fresh skills and knowledge to steal Sarvis away from me...And I knew that for now, anyway, and maybe for months or years, she wouldn’t really be able to compete with someone like me who had the power to feed Sarvis, drive him places and rent from Netflix." Because, of course, that's what he'll want from a romantic relationship!

As for the bathroom wall, because it embarrassed my child, I wanted the satisfaction of tearing it down myself. But because it expressed so forcefully a plain, unequivocal truth, I also wished to hijack Graffiti Girl’s intentions and keep the wall as a shrine. The thing would look great, I thought, hanging as an extra panel in our garage or barn where I could go to affirm my love every day.And where some child wrote, “I love Sarvis,” I would like to use a knife, a screwdriver, or even the little piece of metal that holds an eraser to a yellow pencil to add to the graffiti. 'More than you ever will, little girl,' I’d carve into that metal wall. 'I love Sarvis more than you ever will.'"

Okay then! The author's mental state and the probable issues of the adult Sarvis aside, can we talk about a culture in which someone feels like this is an appropriate essay to share? We've discussed, before, the "I write therefore I am" ethos that's abroad nowadays — and we're certainly all in the gut-spilling game here, to varying degrees. There is a sense that if you say something it's valid — especially if you say it in pre-approved MFA terms that demonstrate a degree of narcissism masquerading as self-awareness. I don't even blame this woman for writing this; people are screwed up. But why does the Times run it? And in so doing, are they validating her sentiments, or simply giving them a platform - and in so doing leaving them open to well-earned censure? The better question is, is either of these rationales a valid one? I get it: "Modern Love" is a column which aims to explore "love" in all its many permutations and the modern world is a complex place, etc. etc. But the act of publishing is not an objective one and I think one could argue that whatever one;s interpretation of this article — and I'm seriously hoping most people's reaction is wtf? — running the piece is in some wise an act of irresponsibility.

That said, the ultimate responsibility is of course the author's, who seems to be attempting to apply an implicit universality to emotions which, while perhaps they're somewhat common — motherhood is complex! — are obviously not healthy given her relationship to the little girls involved. It's perhaps naive to ascribe a saintly impartiality to teachers, but one does imagine that the person teaching one's children doesn't necessarily come equipped with a preemptive distrust of half her students. Kids have crushes. And from what I remember, there was nothing particularly sinister about it.

It's true, kids today are living in a highly sexualized time. But the only overt sexualization in this piece is, ironically, projected onto these children by the author. I was talking recently with a friend who told me about the 'Robin Hood' party she'd thrown for her son's sixth birthday. There was a little girl he liked, and she was Maid Marian; he gave her a special flower crown to wear. My friend thought the story was adorable; it seems like the author of this piece would likely have ripped the crown off the child's head and paraded around triumphantly. Which is, of course, totally valid.

The Tiny Hand That Robs The Cradle[New York Times]