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The broad empirical facts are not disputed. Four friends: Hannah Pittard, Andrew Ewell, Anna Shearer, Ryan Fox. Two marriages. Years ago, they fell in together in and around the world of postgrad creative writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There’s a photograph from back when things were still good, all of them huddled together on a couch in a pose of easy camaraderie: four artists only beginning to discover the ways ambition might reshape their lives. They all stayed friends until, in the first week of July 2016, Andrew, who was married to Hannah, slept with Anna, who was married to Ryan. A couple of weeks later, Hannah found out. Soon, both marriages were over.
It’s the kind of story — one of turmoil, epiphany, evolution, damage, hope, betrayal, rancor, joy — that, as specific and tumultuous as it may be to each person living it, plays out thousands of times every day. And in its wake, each of those involved finds their own way to deal with it. Some suppress it all in silence. Some lean into forgiveness, some dive headlong into recrimination. Some endlessly replay, some yearn to forget. But whichever choices are made, the blast radius is usually localized. Explosions like these are forever going off all around us, but you’d barely know.
Then there are writers.
Somewhere in the void between “Write what you know†and “Do no harm†sits a whole world of possibility. In this, too, everyone involved must find their own way. I’m sitting outside a restaurant in the center of Charlottesville discussing such things with Andrew Ewell. Earlier this year, Ewell published a novel, Set for Life. Its narrator is unnamed, but his initial circumstances closely mirror what Ewell’s once were: a frustrated writer married to a more successful novelist, the two of them teaching in the English department of a liberal-arts college, his job offered as a “spousal hire†to help lure her. In the novel’s first chapter, the narrator, on his way home from a writing fellowship in France, stops over to see his and his wife’s good friends, a couple living in Brooklyn. (In the book, they are named Sophie and John and his wife is named Debra.) Near the end of chapter one, the unnamed narrator sleeps with Sophie.
Over the next two days, Ewell and I will spend much of our time discussing the abstract parameters that govern what one can and can’t do when one sits down to an empty page. Which, in his view, is mostly can. “I think that’s the only rule for writing: Everything’s fair game,†he says. Later, he clarifies this somewhat. “I think if you produce shitty work and you’re just airing dirty laundry and it doesn’t rise to the level of art … I mean, then what’s the point? But if it communicates something sincere in the manner that you hope art does, then that justifies the risk. Don’t make shitty art, I guess is what I’m saying.â€
Ewell is far from the first writer to pivot on the intimate details of their personal life. But one circumstance in which he finds himself is somewhat less commonplace. In May 2021, he sent the manuscript of Set for Life to an agent. That November, he learned some disconcerting information.
In his novel, the narrator — who in this fictional world initially returns to live with his wife, his affair still secret — eventually realizes that his wife has known about the affair for some time and has been writing a book that will chronicle the disintegration of their marriage. Now, in the real world, Ewell discovered that a version of his story was actually happening. His ex-wife had written a book about their falling apart, and it would be published nine months before his.
Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many, a book billed in its subtitle as “A Memoir [kind of],†was published in May 2023. The scene is set by the first sentence of its back-cover précis: “In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish.â€
Exactly how fully this event defines either book is something that the authors at times fiercely dispute — an argument that will seem sometimes to be about writing, sometimes about the contested debris of past relationships. But let’s use a term that both books employ in different contexts: the “inciting incident.†At the very least, these two books share the same inciting incident. And often much more than that.
A few weeks after I speak with Ewell in Charlottesville, I meet Pittard at a Mexican restaurant in Lexington, not far from the University of Kentucky, where she is a professor in the English department. Before any food has arrived, she is already describing herself to me. “I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing and making shit up,†she says. “I think everyone in my family now, if you ask them, would tell you that I am a liar. And they would say that, I think, with great love. I always thought there was a better way of telling something that happened. There was always a better ending. There was a better twist.â€
Pittard tells me that when she was young, she had trouble fitting in. She went to Deerfield, a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts, and she used to talk to her reflection in the mirror about becoming a different version of herself — one who was outgoing and fun, and could admit to wanting to be pretty, and would say “yes†to going to parties, and wouldn’t cry so much. It was a long process, but by the time she arrived in Charlottesville, it was beginning to happen. Her new friend Anna Shearer, whom she met on her first day of the writing program (Shearer was beginning her second year), was part of it. “She was stunning,†Pittard says. “She stood out. She was cool. She looked Parisian. She was confident. She looked the way I wanted to look, and she paid me attention, and it was so addictive and flattering.â€
Soon Pittard also knew Ryan Fox, a poet and bartender who was dating Shearer. Ewell was the last of the four she met. After Pittard’s first published short story appeared in McSweeney’s in 2005, someone told her that there was this musician who had dropped out of grad school “who was going to write a takedown of McSweeney’s and how it was just like this hipster place to publish stories.†They were talking about Ewell. Soon afterward, she was taken to see a well-liked local band, American Dumpster. Ewell was the guitarist and, at the time, dating the band’s washboard player. It was Shearer who introduced the couple-to-be — in Pittard’s memory, she said, “You’re the only two dorks I know who play Scrabble — you guys should play Scrabble together.†So they did. For a couple of years, they were friends. Then they were together. Five or six years after becoming a couple, in December 2012, they married.
Pittard’s first novel was published in 2011, a second two years later, and one version of her marriage leaks around the edges of her promotional interviews for these books. In 2013, she referred to Ewell as “the love of my life.†Later that year, facing down a pushy TV interviewer who wanted her to talk about infidelity, she declared that she would never cheat on her husband and he would never cheat on her: “He’s an open book. He’s great. He’s the best. He’s the most loyal person in the world.â€
This rendering of their relationship does resurface now and then in my conversations with Pittard. “I had wonderful times with him,†she tells me. “When we were good, we were so fucking good. He could be fucking funny as shit. He could be charming. He could be so sweet.â€
Much of what she most treasured seems to have been anchored to their shared passion for the written word. “I’ve never talked to somebody about writing fiction and enjoyed it so much as I have with Andrew,†she says. “One of my favorite things to do would be to read the same book and to talk about it at the craft level. We’d read lines aloud to each other. That really sustained us for a long time.†She pauses, as though assessing whether to voice the sentence cued up in her head. “I never loved his writing,†she eventually continues. “I thought that it read like somebody who had read a ton and understood story as much as anybody understood ‘story,’ in quotes. But I’ve never liked reading my work aloud to anybody as much as I liked reading it aloud to him. And I loved his feedback, and I miss it. Like, it made me a better writer.â€
That was one fissure. Another was the unstated dynamic between two writers who can’t help but notice the uneven validation they are receiving from the world. “There’s a pro, and there’s a con,†she says, “and the pro is This fucker gets it. The downside is it’s a fucking competition and no one’s saying it. And you’re a woman, he’s a man, and you fucked up getting there first.â€
Before I spoke with Ewell and Pittard, I trawled through everything I could find that they have written or said. Pittard had left the busier trail and, in one interview, offered the following perspective: “Everything in my life that has been traumatic or difficult has at some point or another become material for either a short story or a novel. I’m so used to cannibalizing my own life. And when I got to this particular event, this betrayal, there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that I was going to write about it. In fact I think one of my greatest fears, because everyone involved is a writer, was that one of them would get to it before I did.â€
In the introduction to We Are Too Many, Pittard rues a moment in grad school when she used a privately shared revelation about a classmate’s husband in a story, and also explains how, in the wake of using aspects of her grandfather’s suicide and its aftermath in her second novel, Reunion, “there are people who have never forgiven me for the trespass.†In an earlier essay, she related how she realized, some way into writing what would become her third novel, Listen to Me (eventually published the same month her life with Ewell exploded), that she’d been subconsciously basing the novel’s warring couple on herself and Ewell. Once she became aware of this, her response was not to pull back. Instead, she started mining her troubled marriage in the most deliberate of ways — for instance, purposefully wading into an argument with Ewell and then excusing herself to the bathroom so that she could get down the best of the back-and-forth on her iPhone’s Notes app.
Last year, Pittard offered another kind of take on such dilemmas. Around the release of the memoir, she had a brief dalliance with making TikTok videos, and one begins with this caption:
“POV You’re a writer and the guy you’re seeing asks you not to write about him.â€
The viewer then sees Pittard speaking, as though addressing someone just off-camera, in a tone both beseeching and conciliatory:
“I would, I would never, oh my gosh, I feel bad that you would even think you have to ask me that, I would never, I promise, I would never write about you — that’s just not how it works.â€
The caption then changes to:
“Later that day.â€
Now, we see Pittard’s hands typing on a keyboard and, on the computer screen, the words she is typing.
“Chapter one.
“His name was Bruce. He was bald. He made me promise that I would never write about him. I promised.â€
Set for Life is Ewell’s first book. Before that, he had published a handful of short stories. The first of these, called “Everything in Its Place,†appeared in the UVA literary magazine, Meridian, back in 2007. Ewell’s story was accepted for publication by the magazine’s fiction editor, Pittard, before they were dating, in a role she took over from Shearer, who had been working alongside the magazine’s poetry editor, Fox.
Over the years, Ewell wrote three unpublished novels, each of which, he now says, “didn’t work.†In retrospect, he tells me, he had been writing books that he felt he was supposed to write rather than ones he truly cared about. Before starting Set for Life, he had more or less given up, and it was in that spirit that he proceeded: “It was like, All right, here’s my last hurrah — nobody’s going to publish this, nobody’s going to read it. I might as well just say whatever the fuck I want to say.†What it was that he did want to say he discovered along the way. “Even when I wrote this book, I didn’t consciously decide I’m going to write a book about my last marriage or something,†he says. “It’s just things swirl in your head and they come to take a shape.â€
I quote to him Pittard’s words about worrying someone else would write about all of this before she did. “That tracks,†he says evenly. “I mean, that’s how she is. One of the ways in which I feel like we didn’t get each other ultimately is I think we have very different attitudes toward the reading public and about how we want to write books. It makes sense that she would think she has a story and she wants to get it out there before anyone else does.â€
In truth, Pittard could hardly be accused of getting the account in We Are Too Many out there with reckless haste — it appeared nearly seven years after what happened happened — though she did address the subject in print for the first time long before that. In May 2017, ten months after that inciting incident, she published an essay, “Scenes From a Marriage,†in the journal The Sewanee Review in which she laid bare her version of some fault lines in her marriage to Ewell: how, after they moved to Kentucky to take up twin tenure-track academic jobs, Ewell relentlessly complained about everything; the stresses caused by her greater success as a writer; how she mined their marriage for the novel she was working on; what she saw as his contemptuous response when she begged him to see a therapist (asked to commit to a date by which he’d do so, he picked February 14). Near the essay’s end, she explained how she had come around to seeing the infidelity as “a paradoxical gift†because she believes that she would never have walked away, however aware she was of all that was wrong between them.
We Are Too Many begins with a hundred or so pages of conversations. Most, as she explains in the book, are re-created from memory, though a few are imagined. The opening conversation reveals how, when she comes to New York in July 2016, a friend tells her the news of her husband’s affair. The third conversation details how, at six o’clock the next morning, she confronted Trish (as Shearer is named in the book) on the phone, eventually getting confirmation: “He says you’ve always been terrified of this happening,†Trish tells her. In the fourth conversation, she speaks with Patrick (as Ewell is named in the book), who likewise acknowledges the truth.
HANNAH: Thank you for your honesty. I get the house. I get the car. I get the dog. I’ll see a lawyer on Monday.
PATRICK: Did you rehearse that?
Then, later in that same back-and-forth:
HANNAH: There are like 9 million women you could have had sex with, and we would have worked it out … But I’ve made it incredibly clear from the beginning that there is one woman who is off-limits.
PATRICK: You’re so self-righteous. It’s disgusting.
And off it goes from there. One aspect of the book’s spirit is that it is brutal and unsparing (to its author, too) and yet at times seems calibrated and compassionate, a balance summarized in a pointed turn of phrase Pittard used in an interview about it, explaining that she “wanted to make sure that I was never being unnecessarily cruel.†There’s enough weight on the word unnecessarily in that sentence to push whole cities into the ocean.
Ewell is probably the worst placed of any potential reader to appreciate the book’s merits, and so it proves. “I didn’t feel that I saw anything of myself, really,†he says. “And I don’t think I really saw anything of Anna either.†(Ewell and Shearer stayed together and are now married.) “I guess I would say I feel like the portrayals of everyone are not fully convincing.â€
It would be inaccurate to say that Ewell doesn’t strain at times to show respect to Pittard and to her work, or to the best parts of the life they shared together, but it would be wrong to suggest that these efforts are entirely successful. “I think that Hannah has a great deal of confidence in herself as a writer and deems pretty much whatever she puts down on paper worth publishing. So that’s a very different way of …†he says, breaking off. “And again, I don’t want to sound like I’m disparaging her. I often wish I had more of that kind of confidence, that pride of production, but I don’t.â€
Later, he explains more explicitly what he means. “She is good at tapping into what’s fashionable and what the marketplace desires. And right now, divorce memoirs is a fashionable subject. Again, I don’t mean to say that’s a bad thing, necessarily. I just think it’s a way that she thinks about writing that it turned out I feel quite the opposite.â€
One further peculiar aspect of all this is that Ewell had already touched on these events in fiction several years before his novel, in a 2019 story called “Halloween†that was published in Juxtaprose magazine, but appears strangely unaware that he did so. “I don’t think of that story as being very rooted in experience or anything,†he says when I mention it, seemingly mystified that I might bring it up in this context.
I point out he is clearly using his marriage in it. He seems perplexed. “There’s an ex-wife with a boyfriend or something?†he asks. To which, well, yes, but rather more than that: The narrator’s ex-wife has stayed in the college town where they’d both once worked and married a man named Bruce, the former chair of the department, who has a daughter from a previous marriage. She is made full professor in three years. All of this mirrors Pittard’s subsequent life (aside from the fact she and her partner, Jeff Clymer, are not formally married). But that’s far from the main part. When Ewell continues to profess puzzlement, I have to pull out a copy of his own story from my bag and read back to him the relevant paragraph:
“Before Maisie and I got together, she had said, ‘Fuck anybody but her. Seriously, I don’t care. Just not her.’ I was about to leave on a research trip. I’d be in New York for a few weeks, where Maisie and her ex-husband were then living. When I eventually told Angela that I had fucked Maisie, and that in fact, I loved her, she responded — thoughtful pause, glasses removed — with what seemed like a prepared statement. ‘Okay, I’ll call a lawyer in the morning.’â€
“Weird!†Ewell says. “I don’t remember that at all. But, yeah, I mean I guess I’m calling on my experiences and memories more than I thought.â€
All of which takes on greater significance for a very particular reason: This is a story in which the narrator’s ex-wife, Angela, is stabbed to death by a homeless man on the university campus. In other words, if we accept that Angela is based on Pittard, Ewell has written a story in which he imagines and depicts her murder.
I ask whether he didn’t consider what Pittard would think if she read this.
“It didn’t occur to me at all,†he says.
As I dug into everything in the days before I flew to Charlottesville, I discovered something else, something I suspected Ewell perhaps might not know. This turns out to be the case.
Ewell is already aware that Pittard has a new book in the works, but in the publishing announcement’s relatively anodyne brief, the book is referred to as an “autofictive story of a 43-year-old author†facing unforeseen disruptions after various members of her family relocate to the small midwestern university town where she teaches. Deep into a podcast she recorded last year, Pittard gave a differently angled description of what the book will be, one relevant to our discussions. I quote it to Ewell: “It’s a dark comedy about a writer, Hannah, who finds out that her ex-husband is publishing his debut novel, and his debut novel is about the dissolution of their marriage.â€
Ewell looks at me, and, as often in our conversations, he waits in silence for an actual question.
That’s news to you?
“Fuck, yeah! I didn’t know that. I mean, it’s exhausting.â€
I ask for his thoughts.
“I guess my thought is it just seems ridiculous to me. I mean, Jesus. Like, she can write whatever she wants.â€
The other thing she says, I tell him, is that the novel is about how the discovery that you’re writing this book slowly drives her crazy.
“Well, I don’t know,†he says. “I don’t get it.â€
When Pittard and I meet, I think she genuinely strains, as Ewell had done, not to disparage her former partner. (Though maybe within her declared metric: not unnecessarily.) But as with Ewell, the dam holding back the rawest feelings has severe structural failings. One of many emblematic horror stories, which she explains in layered, convincing detail, is her recollection of the day she got her first book deal (for the novel The Fates Will Find Their Way). She describes Ewell’s rising irritation as the increasingly high-flown book auction continued throughout an afternoon, culminating in his demand at what she believes should have been the moment of celebration: “What does this mean for me?†“It was one of the first times,†she tells me, “that I remember thinking, I’m going to have to break up with him — I might not love him anymore.†(This was not a version of reality Ewell recognized. “As I recall, I remember being really excited about her first book and being really excited for her. That doesn’t necessarily mean I didn’t have some feelings of kind of some envy or whatever about it, but I don’t know. Those mixed emotions seem more interesting to me than someone saying, ‘What does this do for me?’ That just seems very … that seems not true to history.â€)
Some of the roughest stories Pittard tells about Ewell are about money: in the early days, his drinking cocktails in a pricey Charlottesville restaurant, waiting for her to finish her shift waitressing and spend what she had just earned on picking up his tab; Ewell frittering away her latest book advance gambling in New Orleans when she was neck-deep in credit-card debt. Even so, she’s clear that she let this happen, all of it. “I knew it was wrong because I am not unintelligent — but I fucking wanted him,†she says. “I wanted him. He was handsome. He made me feel cool. He made me feel validated. I thought he was so smart. I’ve never had a boyfriend like him before who looked good and, like, other girls envied. And I wanted to keep him.â€
She describes to me where their relationship was in the buildup to its final rupture, when they were disagreeing about almost everything and she was working on Listen to Me: “I was thinking, I’m still fucking mad at you. It doesn’t matter, because this is a thing I love, and the thing loves me back.â€
So, to be blunt, “This is more important — I care more about this right now?â€
“Absolutely. That is why it is not his fault. When he said — I don’t know if this made it into the memoir — ‘You don’t want to have sex with me, but you also don’t want me to have sex with other people,’ that is true. I did not want to have sex with him. I was mad as fuck at him. And I didn’t want him to have sex with other people. But, like, fuck him! And yet, did my book mean more to me? For sure. Yes, I privileged this book over my marriage because I was mad, because the marriage wasn’t giving me anything.â€
The book’s dedication — they were still together when it went to press — reads “For Andrew, without whom this story wouldn’t exist.â€
If some readers find the clarity Pittard just expressed about her priorities a little chilling, it’s worth pointing out that she and Ewell appear to agree on this matter. When I mentioned Listen to Me to Ewell, he said that a friend told him he couldn’t imagine how he’d feel if his wife had written a book like that. From there, our conversation continued like this:
“I don’t think it’s accurate to say I don’t care or didn’t care, but I suppose I did have, and do have, the feeling that it’s her prerogative to write whatever she wants to write. Did that contribute to difficulty in the marriage? Probably, looking back, yeah … but I suspect that neither one of us would have chosen to sacrifice or compromise what we wanted to work on for the sake of the marriage. I mean, at least to my mind, that comes second.â€
The marriage?
“Yeah. I don’t know. Yes. I guess that’s my answer.â€
Some people will be horrified by that.
“People who are writers or artists, or people who are not?â€
Fair question. Maybe both. But I get why you’re asking. Let me put it in a more awkward way: Would Anna be comfortable hearing you say that?
“Yeah, for sure. She might add a caveat, which is that the writing had better be good as a result. I mean, why does anyone become a writer, a writer of fiction, particularly if they don’t think that there’s something a little more important to them, a little more natural to them, in the fictional environment than in the real world? Isn’t that kind of what draws one to fiction to begin with?â€
But is that worth potentially destroying things in the everyday world?
“You hope the value is that you communicate something to a reader to make them feel less lonely. Here’s one person talking to another and saying something truthful about how they look at the world. And I think there’s something about that communion that for those of us who care about it, it makes us feel less lonely. It makes us feel like someone gets us.â€
I’m not saying I completely disagree with you, but I can hear people’s voices objecting, saying: “What about the person sitting next to you on the sofa going, ‘You want someone who gets you? There’s someone who gets you right here who you’re ignoring to do this!’â€
“Sure. Well, okay. Yeah, it depends who that person is. It would be too simplistic to say that I married the wrong person when I married Hannah. But I also think that at some point along the way, we started to feel like we didn’t really get each other. I mean, she had intimated divorce earlier in that year, before anything happened with me and Anna. And at that time, I was probably a pretty difficult person to live with. I was unhappy. I didn’t like being in Kentucky, and I didn’t feel particularly successful in my career, my writing life, my creative life. And I was probably kind of a bitch to deal with. So I don’t know. I imagine that Hannah probably felt like maybe if I was the person next to her on the sofa, then I probably didn’t get her very well either.â€
As for what actually happened in those weeks in the summer of 2016, much of it is depicted in their writing, and more is clarified or qualified in the conversations we had. In June, Ewell was at a writing retreat near Bordeaux, after which he and Pittard met in Paris for a few days that didn’t go well. Then they flew back separately to the U.S., Ewell arriving in New York on the afternoon of June 29, planning to stay with Fox and Shearer for the next week. There, Ewell and his married friends went out for the evening, though Fox ultimately wandered off in his own orbit. (His and Shearer’s marriage was already fractured in complex ways.) As Ewell put it to me, “That’s when Anna and I started just talking and kind of finding out we were both in really depressed places in our lives, and kind of reconnecting with an old friend and also kind of that feeling of, like, I don’t know, What other kinds of lives are out there for us? … I mean, it was pretty immediate.â€
He and Shearer spent the next few days together, then Ewell went up to Yaddo. On July 19, Pittard came to town ahead of a book event the following evening. That night, just before bed, a friend she was staying with told her about Ewell and Shearer. She called Shearer at six the next morning. In retrospect, she’s proud of how she handled what ensued. “It was really like a conversation of my fucking life — it was so good,†she declares. She says that at first Shearer denied what had happened, at which point Pittard said, “I can’t talk to you,†and hung up. Then Shearer called right back, and they got into it. Pittard remembers, at the end, Shearer asking, “Do you want me to have him call you?†which infuriated her: “I’m like, ‘Go fuck yourself. He’s my husband.’â€
She says it was a few hours later when Ewell phoned her: “I thought, No, I don’t want to be the one to call him. I want him to call me. And I also thought, She’ll have called him; they’ll have talked it out. Whatever conversation we end up having will be closer to grounded than if I do a gotcha. Which is clearly what I did with her. I did a gotcha with her. That should give you a sense of how, in many ways, I felt more betrayed by her than by him.â€
After her conversation with Ewell, Pittard emailed someone who knew those involved and whom she had long considered a mentor, the writer Ann Beattie, sharing the abrupt change in her circumstance:
Well, shit. I’m getting divorced. It’s going to seem strange and out of the blue that you’re one of the few people I want to tell about this but, Ann, I have to tell you: in part because it is so stupid it’s almost funny: Andrew and Anna Shearer think they’re in love. (!!!!????!!!!) … He’s always known that she is the one person an affair with whom I could never forgive.
Pittard still had five hours to kill before her book reading that night, so she went to Zara. In her unhappy early 20s, she’d developed an unusual habit: She’d go to Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, gather up an array of expensive clothes she couldn’t afford, then lock herself in the well-lit safety of a dressing room, undress, and go to sleep for hours surrounded by the outfits she would almost never buy before waking and trying them on, playacting the personalities she imagined she one day might have. Now she sought a new version of the same kind of safety. She locked herself into the Zara dressing room and then, sitting in her underwear, texted messages to two men she thought might be interested in her, each beginning with the sentence “Guess who’s getting a divorce?†“I was mad and I felt ignored and I felt pissed,†she explains. “And this motherfucker just had sex with that person.†She wasn’t actually interested in pursuing anything with these men, but she wanted their attention and successfully got it. She also bought a skirt that she wore at that evening’s event at Housing Works.
Fox came to the reading — he had found out about the affair that day, too — and afterward they went out to dinner with friends. She says that night at around midnight, she spoke to Ewell again: “He and I had it out. He said, ‘I think you’re fucking other people.’ And I was like, ‘The only person not getting fucked here is me.’ It was this horrible conversation. That was the only time I ever remember yelling at him.â€
The next day, she took the train to Washington for a book event. On the train, she was bawling and texting and talking on the phone about all of it, and blowing her nose into a shirt, then weeping some more, and at one point she said to the man in a suit next to her, by way of a retort to the disapproval she’d imputed to him, “I’m not contagious.†Then, when he rose to leave the train at Philadelphia, the man simply said, in a way that seemed to her almost unbearably empathetic, “It’s going to be okay.†And she lost it all over again. Before the reading, she had her sister smear hemorrhoid cream on her puffed-up eyes.
In the aftermath, Ewell kept his teaching position in Lexington for the next couple of years, so he and Pittard were still working in the same English department when she published her essay in The Sewanee Review about their marriage. But when I mention the essay to Ewell, he tells me he’s not sure he’s read it.
“What’s it about?†he asks. “I mean, I know that I heard about it. I know that people called me and said, ‘Oh, did you see Hannah’s piece?’â€
Pittard’s account of that time is different. Ewell knew she was working on it, she said. “And he wrote me an email after it came out. It was, like, classic Andrew. He congratulates me and he says I did a really good job and I got most of it right and I should be really proud of myself. It was very paternalistic and a little bit patronizing and a little bit generous. It was everything that was wrong with us in one email.â€
When I relay to her what Ewell had told me — that he couldn’t remember whether he actually read her essay — she responds carefully. “I’ll say this: It’s not strange to me at all that he would have said that to you,†she says, “and that was a problem.†When I ask whether she thinks Ewell believes what he told me, or thought I wouldn’t find out otherwise, or whether there’s some other explanation, she responds, “I literally live for, like, imagining what the answer to that is,†and then expands on her own nuanced approach to how writing and the truth must intermingle and on how she believes this differs from Ewell’s. “For somebody who is also a liar and who loves to then tell stories, I have this very fine understanding of: This is where it became a story, and this is what the fact is,†she says. “When I was married to somebody who did not have a fine grasp of obvious facts, I felt gaslit a lot. I understand your question. Do you think he really believes it? I don’t know. We talked about the essay! It drives me crazy. But maybe he forgot!â€
In my inbox the next morning is a copy of Ewell’s email.
Hi, Hannah,
I just want to say I read your essay. It’s candid, elegant, and true — in the Keatsian sense, which is to say, beautiful. (I confess I cried a little.) I admire your honesty, and I envy your bravery. (There’s not a little talent in there, too …) It’s hard to reckon with the truth, let alone make that truth unassailably convincing to your reader (especially if he’s your ex-husband).
Anyway, I guess I just want to congratulate you. And I want to say: Maybe we won’t be the best friends we once were, but your essay gives me hope we won’t forget the friends we were for a long and important time …
Envoi: You wrote a beautiful and heartbreakingly honest essay. Damn, Pittard! You’re a hell of a writer, and you got to the heart of the matter, you really did.
Brava,
Andrew
When shown this email, Ewell responds, “I have zero recollection of writing that, or of reading the essay, but it appears that I did,†and suggests that he wrote it “to take the high road.†Furthermore: “It’s also worth noting that a big part of the reason I don’t think her memoir came off very well, aesthetically, I mean, is that it accomplished so little of what I seem to praise in that email.â€
It was toward the end of 2018 when Pittard first began to make notes in a file on her computer, short episodes experimenting with different ways she might possibly reexamine this material. One was titled “I GET THE HOUSE, CAR, DOG.†Another, “Stanley Lleweling was in love with his own charm†— Lleweling being some mutant version of Ewell. Another, “There were so many reasons to hate Minnie Grizwald.†Grizwald was her. (“I gave me a really horrible name,†she notes.) Around that time, she says, her momentum as a writer felt stalled. She’d been very happy with Listen to Me — “A brilliant book,†she contends — as she had been with her first. But she felt she’d misjudged some decisions with the fourth, Visible Empire, set in Atlanta in the aftermath of the real-life 1962 air disaster in which a plane full of Atlanta grandees on a European museum tour died on the Paris tarmac. “I had deadlines, I was going through divorce,†she says. After that, she’d written a novel called Hot Stuff but no publisher accepted it, and she says that on reflection it “didn’t have oxygen in it.â€
In late 2019, she turned her focus back toward her own recent experiences: “I thought, Here’s a great story, right? It’s like a classic story of betrayal. Every story has been told, but this is my story, and I have intimate understanding of it.†She resolved to write it as fiction: “I thought this was going to be so easy. It’s just fill-in-the-blanks.â€
Off she went. Along the way, she experimented with writing passages in Shearer’s voice, in Ewell’s voice, and in the voice of a fictionalized version of herself. “I especially tried writing it from Anna’s perspective,†Pittard says. “Because I thought it was going to be very easy to make fun of me. I thought, That’s a funny place to start a book — a woman who’s gotten the guy and what she’s thinking about is how much she hates the woman that she got the guy from. And I had some fun with that.†But as she pressed forward, she realized that it wasn’t working. “I guess I thought, What’s at stake?†she says. “What made my story interesting to me is it was my story, at the end of the day. I’d rather just fucking tell the truth. Let’s get it over with.â€
By now the pandemic was raging and she was shuttered in the attic of her new home with Clymer and his daughter down below. “I felt so like a caged animal up there. And I was just thinking of these conversations, and I was thinking of, You are so pathetic that you let them say this thing to you. And so I wanted to just write it to exorcise it.
“It’s Henry James in The Art of Fiction who says a good writer is someone on whom almost nothing is lost,†she says. “And I was interested in the conversations where things had been lost for me that I hadn’t noticed. Because I like to think of myself as a good writer on whom very little is lost. Which is why this setting and situation — I think it hurt my ego. The fact that they cheated on me, and that I missed it, hurt my ego sometimes more than it hurt my heart.â€
At one point in our Charlottesville conversations, Ewell reflects that what has been happening between Pittard and him may, when it comes to writers, just be the natural order of things.
“I think that it’s telling that lots of people get divorced, but two people who are writers get divorced and go off in different directions and write stories that help them to make sense of their experiences,†he says, “rather than clash in front of each other or face-to-face or whatever. And that may be something that happens in a lot of literary marriages. I mean, it makes sense to me that if the way that you organize your thoughts is in writing, then you would probably go to the page to do that and maybe not hash it out in real-life conversation with that person, especially once you’ve decided it’s over.â€
There’s a glib way of summarizing what you’re saying, which is, “Now the relationship is over, you can both get down to really getting started with it.â€
“Sure,†he replies, considering this. “Yeah. I don’t think that’s that glib.â€
Pittard sent me a draft of that next book I’d told Ewell about, which is titled If You Love It, Let It Kill You and will be published in July 2025. On the first page, the narrator, Hana, has been told by a friend that her ex-husband has written about her in a novel. Upon hearing this news, she Googles her ex-husband, looking for more details. “In doing so,†she writes, “I accidentally discovered a story he’d written in which I’d been knifed to death by a homeless man.â€
Hana subsequently tells her boyfriend (who, as in life, is a professor with a daughter from his previous marriage) about this — that she’s found a story by her ex in which both she and he feature and in which he is called Bruce. The narrator then announces to the readers of this book that she will be borrowing the name Bruce for her partner from Ewell’s story; for the rest of the book, that is what he is called.
Pittard tells me that she actually heard about Ewell’s book in March 2022, when her agent sent her an email with a screenshot of the Publishers Weekly announcement. Pittard forwarded the screenshot to her friend, the poet laureate Ada Limón, with the note “The motherfucker wrote a memoir.†(Limón had to point out, reading more carefully what Pittard had sent, that it was a novel.) “I was crazed,†Pittard says. She indignantly asked Clymer what he thought about this turn of events and quotes to me what she clearly considered an infuriatingly reasonable response: “Hannah, I think you gotta let it go. You wrote a book about it? He’s written a book about it.â€
That was when, in real life too, Pittard resorted to Google. “Which I haven’t done,†she says. “Because who the fuck Googles him?†Sitting across the kitchen table from Clymer — “He’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ And I’m like, ‘Nothing’†— she chanced upon “Halloween†and began to read.
“First of all,†she says, “it’s my favorite thing he’s ever written. It was great. I actually really liked it.†Second, though, it was a story in which she was murdered, something she found “pretty fucking creepy.â€
This macabre scenario became a kind of punch line in Pittard’s circle — “I’d say to Ada, ‘I’ve been walking around for three years murdered — I had no idea!’†But it started to get to her. She began some new writing, imagined conversations and scenes that she enjoyed reading out loud to Clymer — scenes inspired by this discovery. Eventually these scenes coalesced into her next book, whose catalyst was both the announcement of Ewell’s novel and this dark short story he had written. “ ‘Halloween’ was necessary, a hundred percent. And then it like clearly blossomed. I want him to know†— she breaks into a long, deep, wry laugh — “this book is because of him.â€
And taking his name for your partner, Bruce, and using it throughout your book?
“It is one of my favorite things I have done. And it’s a great name. I’m so grateful for Andrew for giving him such a good name.â€
Pittard says she hasn’t read Ewell’s Set for Life. Or rather, she says, she has only read the 26 pages that Amazon allows you to read as a free preview. “And I skimmed them,†she says. “I thought, That’s plenty. I’ve seen what I need to see.â€
Ewell and Pittard were not the only writers involved in this turmoil; indeed, the evidence available to me suggested that neither of them were the first to have published a written reflection on any of this. These days, Ryan Fox is a transactional-IP lawyer, but he remains — just as he was when they were all together in Charlottesville — a poet. And in early May 2017, a few weeks before The Sewanee Review published Pittard’s essay, a poem written by Fox titled “And Both Hands Wash the Face†appeared in The New Yorker. In it, the poem’s narrator opens a copy of Four Quartets and is confronted by the handwriting of the person with whom, it is implied, he used to share the book. Pittard writes about this poem in We Are Too Many, and how Fox had texted her about it. “He wrote: ‘It’s about being caught off guard by your ex’s marginalia.’ Then he wrote: ‘Sad!’ To which I responded: ‘Sad!’†To me, in Lexington, she says, “That poem was really lovely, and I was so proud of him that it was in The New Yorker. You know, I took a book to capture what he took ten lines to do.â€
But when Fox meets with me one evening at a bar in Greenpoint, the first thing we establish is that there’s been a misunderstanding. His poem, which he wrote a few years before it was published, when he was in law school, is about a different, earlier ex. He registered Pittard’s misreading in her book but saw no need to contact her about it. “It didn’t bother me that much,†he says.
No matter. Fox did write about this part of his life, though not immediately. For a while after the summer of 2016, he was, he says, “in life mode. I was in a new relationship right after. I didn’t really have time to process what had happened. I was sort of, like, focusing on survival and things like that.†Then, in the fall of 2017, taking some time off from his day job, on a retreat at Yaddo (these are Yaddo-punctuated lives), he started to write a long poem, “Eppur Si Muove.†The poem flies widely through the disjunctions of mid-teens America before circling in on the violence at Charlottesville and its implications. As he did this, Fox found himself juxtaposing these broader upheavals with his memories of Shearer — he wasn’t really in touch with her, or Ewell, at the time — and what had happened to them. “Addressing,†he says, “a lost love.â€
Where have you gone, my eyes and ears,
Dumpster of a dozen years?
Where are you, hand of my glove,
What became of courtly love?
This poem stands alone as the final section in Fox’s as-yet-unpublished poem collection, Nineteenth Symphony, which he has sent to me ahead of our meeting. Many of the poems in its first section, “After Love,†offer earlier reflections on the unspooling of his relationship with Shearer, written — and often published — as it was happening. “Accessing,†he says, “the sort of gallows humor and the tenderness of a failing marriage.â€
No one is really home but the lights turn on anyway —
no one is really sure what compulsions remain —
The first lines of the first poem, “Nights and Weekends,†are:
“Where you can’t do anything about it, can’t do anything more to save it,†says Fox, of that poem, “and sort of helpless but recognizing that there’s some tenderness still left or something.â€
I ask whether he and Shearer would discuss what these poems were saying about the two of them when he wrote them.
“I mean, no,†he says. “That would have been a classic us. We weren’t discussing that. She was like, ‘Great job — that’s an awesome poem.’ Like, ‘Let’s celebrate.’ That was our M.O., honestly. It was something that became clear after a certain time — that there was a problem we needed to address. But weren’t able to. In our marriage. And we probably had ways of addressing it that were nonverbal — like through the poems.â€
After Fox moved to Charlottesville in 2003, he met Shearer at a party that he and his then-girlfriend threw: “I think she did some dumb graffiti to our toilet.†Within a year, they were together. He became friends with Pittard through Shearer.
He tells me that he found Pittard’s We Are Too Many “exhilarating†to read. He particularly liked the scenes between Pittard and Shearer back in those early Charlottesville days. “Even though it was maybe not the nicest stuff that was happening between them,†he says, “it brought back a time in my life that was carefree and enjoyable to think about.†On the other side of the ledger, he says, “obviously I didn’t love the way I was portrayed.â€
How would you say she portrayed you?
“Um, I guess as a maudlin drunk.â€
Why do you think that was her take?
“There’s nothing defamatory in that portrayal of me. And nothing probably untrue. There were some nights, you know, when I was the maudlin drunk and tried to call her. That part’s not untrue. It’s that it’s at the expense of the rest of the character that I take issue with. Also, I feel like that character maybe bore the brunt of the drinking for all four. Which I understand from, like, a literary perspective.â€
He says he enjoyed Ewell’s Set for Life a lot more. “I love the levity of it and the caper aspect of it,†he says. “I like a good comedy.†He enjoyed his own character, George, too. In Ewell’s book, Fox’s stand-in approaches people in bars and serenades them with poetry or sometimes with a Charlie Chaplin routine. “It’s a comic character, so it is larger-than-life in a way,†he says. “But also it’s a very charming character.â€
As for both books’ depiction of his and Shearer’s marriage as essentially already broken, he says that’s fair enough.
“It was, I think, an open secret among our friends,†he says. “Especially as that summer neared, it was clear that some sort of drastic intervention would have had to happen for us to save it.â€
In fact, he had separately started seeing a new girlfriend in those same weeks and had taken a suitcase over to her house a few days before learning the truth about Ewell and Shearer. He received that information on the day of Pittard’s New York book reading. Shearer texted him, asking if they could speak: “I took the phone call, and I heard her voice, and she was, like, full of fear and shaking almost. So I went into the conference room and shut the door, and she told me that she was in love with Andrew. And, I mean, honestly, my reaction was some mix of, like, hilarity and histrionics and, like, exhilaration. Nonbelief. How was this happening? Like, what? Shock. I mean, I don’t know what people usually feel in these circumstances, but for me it was, first of all, just like an incredibly juicy item of gossip.â€
You’re not supposed to think that about your own life.
“Sure. But also I think I sort of immediately understood that this was sort of the intervention that our marriage needed to be over. I was like, ‘Well, I guess y’all won’t be at the reading tonight. And we’ll be in touch about whatever paperwork or whatever we need to handle with the lease. And the divorce.’â€
As for the reading, “a really great night†is how he describes it.
“Hannah and I were like, ‘Yeah! No rings anymore!’ Literally that was how we greeted one another.â€
Fox echoes what Pittard had told me — that he actively tried to remain friends until it became clear that she no longer wanted this: “It took me a while to understand she didn’t feel the same way that I did about wanting to stay in touch with this group which was quite magical and an important part of all our lives.†Pittard also told me that Ewell considered her inability to stay friends with the group “a failure of imagination.†By this measure, Fox was more successful. He acknowledges that some people are surprised he is now friends with Shearer and Ewell — “I have been made to feel strange about it†— but says that for him it was never really a question. “Andrew helped me move the dresser into my new girlfriend’s place when we were moving out of Anna’s place,†he says. “He and I had beers every time he was in town thereafter. It was a little bit tense or different at first. It took us a couple of years to get back into sort of the fullness of the friendship, both with Anna and Andrew.â€
I explain to Fox the premise of Pittard’s next novel, which he does not know about.
“Okay,†he says. “People can’t get enough of each other.â€
Any thoughts?
“Can’t wait to read it.â€
When I’m in Charlottesville, Ewell tells me about a novel Shearer had written but never published. He describes it to me as “about her years in New York. It’s somewhat about her marriage, but it’s really about kind of like a woman’s loneliness in her life and in her marriage and also kind of a snapshot of Brooklyn in those years … a very dark book about just a very lonely person.†Wondering whether it might contain yet one more take on what had happened between the four of them, I ask Ewell whether the novel went as far forward as 2016. “No, not really,†he says.
Fox tells me he has not read Shearer’s book, though he does know its title is Nights and Weekends. He’d reminded Shearer that he’d used that title first. “I don’t think she cares,†he says. “Not that I do either.†He points out that it’s the name of a bar they used to go to at the very end of Bedford Avenue. “It’s also just a nice title, you know?†he says.
I didn’t meet Shearer when I was in Charlottesville, but I later contact her, and we arrange to speak by video. She also sends me a draft of Nights and Weekends beforehand, characterizing it to me in an email as “a work of autofiction†and telling me this: “It was about my time in New York, being married to Ryan, alcoholism, self-destruction, an addiction story that is harrowing and horrible and thank God it didn’t get published.†Her description is accurate enough; it’s gripping in its chaos, recklessness, and despair, and artfully so. Pittard, who clearly has a bounty of negative feelings about Shearer these days, had nonetheless told me this about Shearer’s writing back when they were in the UVA writing program together: “I think she is an instinctively excellent storyteller. I think Nabokov talks about the thing that can’t be taught, the sort of magic, and some of her stories had that kind of magic. And I wasn’t alone in thinking this.â€
When we speak, Shearer explains to me what she was aiming to achieve with the novel: “So there’s a lot of ways that women try to write about self-destruction, alcoholism, and being very unwell. But I couldn’t find a real version of what it felt like to be in the throes of this. Often, the women, they have too much wine, and then, like, they get confused. And they always remember how they got home. They’re, like, embarrassed: ‘Oh, I made a fool of myself at that party.’ And I would read that and be like, ‘Really?’ There’s something real here, and women don’t really know how to write about it, for whatever reason. So I was trying to tackle that.†In great detail, it lays out her unraveling — one that far transcends too-much-wine befuddlement — and the parallel unraveling of her life with Fox (here named David), a downward trajectory that for most of the book seems to be picking up pace. At one point she writes: “I thought there must be something that people did, to keep the sadness away. But I couldn’t figure out what it was.†“I thought I was going to die,†Shearer tells me. “I was pretty sure of it.†If she’s mostly now glad not to have all of those details out in the world, there’s one aspect she regrets. “I feel bad for the girl in New York killing herself, wishing she could find a voice like that to relate to,†Shearer says. “That’s who I wrote it for.â€
That downward trajectory does eventually break — in the novel as, thankfully, in life. The predicament was, as she puts it, “How am I going to end this relentless onslaught of horrible decisions?†Even if she ultimately had to find the answer within herself, one catalyst would be an old friend. In the novel, we first meet Ewell when Shearer first met him, back in Charlottesville. Well, when I say “Ewell,†of course I mean the autofictional character representing Ewell, and here I need to pause to point out but one more surreal uncanniness: the name Shearer chose for Ewell’s understudy. Patrick. Precisely the same name that his ex-wife had used for him in We Are Too Many. “It was very, very strange,†says Shearer, who nonetheless prefers not to read too much into this. “It has about the same amount of syllables, and it’s a strong main-character name.â€
When Patrick reappears in her book, much later, he now has a wife, Elisabeth. But given what Ewell had told me, I still didn’t expect Nights and Weekends to go where it does toward its end. But it does. Suddenly Patrick is on a visit to New York, on a layover after a writing fellowship in France, and we are hearing another version of what we have heard elsewhere:
Patrick and I had found each other kissing at midnight at an empty bar somewhere I’d never been before … We had come back to the apartment, slept together on the futon while David was passed out in the bedroom. I was mortified the next day, ashamed of myself — I’d had sex with my oldest friend, the friend I used to joke had never made a pass at me, one of the only friendships I had left that I had somehow never sabotaged.
There’s one more thing I should note that I have come to realize about these multiple fictional and semi-fictional accounts of what happened in the summer of 2016. Shearer was writing Nights and Weekends in 2020 in the early months of COVID. That’s the same time that Ewell was deep in Set for Life. And also the time when Pittard was writing We Are Too Many.
I tell Shearer this and say that in the bad movie of this, you’d see these rooms across America in which everyone was writing about the same thing.
“Bad movie?†she asks. “That movie sounds fantastic.â€
Right at the beginning, Shearer says, when she knew him in Charlottesville, she and Ewell — the first of the four to meet — bonded over writing: “He was a musician, and I would drive him to some of his gigs, and we would just talk and talk and talk about writing.†In time, the four of them shared this. “We were all serious,†she says. “It mattered a lot to all of us. We didn’t really see another path necessarily. We were kind of all in, in a way.â€
She describes their collective mind-set with a kind of affectionate mockery. “There’s this expression about graduate programs: that they make you feel like a star when you haven’t even done anything,†she says. “You feel that you were chosen, and you are special, and you’re going to make it.â€
Shearer had some stories published (including one under the pen name Ernest Langbaum — “I don’t know why I did that,†she says). But when she and Fox moved to New York, she declared to herself that she was done. She already had a good job — these days she’s a marketing director at a financial-technology company — “and I just said, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ I’m tired of feeling guilty. I’m tired of feeling like I failed. I just want to move on.†She insists that she was never jealous of the others as they continued to pursue writing with varying degrees of validation. “I just have the gift of not giving a shit about that,†she says.
But eventually, writing drew her back.
Before Shearer sent out Nights and Weekends in January 2021, there was one more bridge to cross. She knew that Ewell needed to read it.
“I was terrified,†she says. “It was horrible.†Whatever she had told him about her New York life, she certainly had not told him all of it. “He didn’t know how bad it was. He didn’t know the exact type of relationship that Ryan and I had at that point. But I didn’t want to say it. I had to give it to him. Sometimes I think I wrote it just so I had it as a record so he could see it.â€
Maybe that’s just one part of the broader utility of capturing one’s life in words.
“Sometimes it’s easier to write about things than think about them,†she says. “You don’t have to think about reality. You think about a description. It’s an escape. You can live in the pages of your book.â€
She says she also thought about showing Nights and Weekends to Fox. But she didn’t and still has not.
“I think it would have made him sad,†she says, “and I think he just would have felt a little bit that I betrayed some things that were personal to our relationship and to each other.â€
She’s retrospectively aware of one further reason to be glad that Nights and Weekends never reached the public: “After seeing everything that has been happening with Andrew’s book and even Hannah’s book, I’m relieved I can stay out of it.†She points out that this aspect has been difficult for Ewell. “It’s unfortunate that his book keeps getting drawn in to this Hannah planet,†she says. “He didn’t want to write a memoir. He never wanted these people to be treated as real individuals. This isn’t a game to Andrew to try to secretly say stuff about real people. I keep telling him, ‘Just write another book. Don’t involve any of these people — just don’t think about it.’†(Both he and Shearer are working on new novels that have nothing to do with the events of July 2016.)
“He’s been doing this seriously for as long as I’ve known him,†Shearer says. “I mean, he’s just committed. He’s dedicated to the form and to the art. It’s not like a hack opportunity for him. He’s old-school. Saul Bellow. He wants to be thought of as the best writer of his generation, you know.â€
This past December, Ewell told me, he and Shearer, stepping into the lobby of a Charlottesville hotel with thoughts of getting a martini before heading home for dinner, ran into a famous writer and her husband. (Ewell hesitates to identify the writer, but when I point out that it is obviously Ann Beattie, he agrees that this is so.) They talked, caught up, and when his novel came up, Beattie expressed enthusiasm for reading it. (In Ewell’s version, Shearer had a copy in her bag, though she told me that she had to go home to get it.) The encounter ended warmly.
In the following days, Ewell received communications from Beattie that he considered contradictory. On the one hand, he and Shearer were invited to brunch. On the other hand — and I am quoting here from an unpublished essay Ewell wrote around the publication of his novel — “She had read the first chapter of my novel, she said, and liked it very much, but couldn’t continue, the reason being that she hadn’t known what it was going to be about, and now that she did, she could not in good conscience read any more of it. She was, after all, still friends with my ex-wife.â€
This baffled him. “It’s just a funny stance for a writer in her 70s who’s been around the block,†he says. He notes that Beattie’s most recent book, Onlookers, names real people in Charlottesville, “like a guy who owns a bookstore and someone who works at the gym.†His point seems to be that there is a literary principle that applies here, maybe something about the sanctity and separation of the work, one at which Beattie is a master. When I put to him that perhaps her response indicates someone prioritizing other values, like friendship, his reaction suggests that he believes her to have made a curiously inexplicable category mistake.
Pittard had told me that she and Beattie email occasionally, so I ask whether Beattie had mentioned running into Ewell. She had not, so I briefly explain to Pittard the above story.
She pauses. There were moments while I was in Lexington when her eyes welled, but this was the only occasion when the obvious trigger was not some kind of hurt.
“I have to tell you,†she eventually begins, “I have a really bad back. And once a year, almost always on my birthday, I go to the ER because it cripples me. And only one time have they ever given me morphine. And there’s a reason that morphine should be kept away from me because the feeling of warmth that washes over my body … I have to say I have a feeling of morphine-induced warmth right now for Ann. And it’s not because I don’t want people to read Andrew’s book, and it’s not because I don’t want him to be successful. But I’m brimming with love for Ann right now.â€
As they each express versions of what was, there are a few stark areas of contention. To Pittard, it is an evident truth that Shearer had intentions toward Ewell: “I think it was a long hand that she’d been playing for several years.†Shearer is adamant that this isn’t so. “I always thought it was pretty clear that I didn’t feel that way toward Andrew,†she says.
“I never had a glimmer of it,†Fox concurs. “There was plenty of people who I was jealous of with respect to Anna. But Andrew was never one of them. And I was genuinely shocked that it was him. And I don’t, in fact, think that Anna was interested in him until this happened.â€
Why do you think Hannah thinks otherwise?
“I mean, I think it fits with her conception of Anna as a more conniving sort of villain. Whereas, if anything, I think her sort of mistake, or whatever, is her impulsiveness. I don’t think Anna has the patience to hatch a plan like that over a multiyear period of time.â€
A key moment in Pittard’s We Are Too Many, the second conversation in the book — the one that really sets the tone that suggests the transgressions described will go way beyond sexual infidelity — is a remembered transcript of a call between Pittard and Shearer in the period when Ewell and Shearer’s relationship had already begun but Pittard had yet to discover it. Pittard is out walking her dog in Lexington; Shearer is in a New York bar.
In the book, the conversation begins like this:
TRISH: I’ve met someone.
HANNAH: You’re always meeting someone.
TRISH: I mean it. He makes me want babies.
HANNAH: Gross.
TRISH: He makes me want to leave my husband.
HANNAH: You say that several times a year.
TRISH: I want him to put babies on me. I’m serious.
That, to Pittard, was a betrayal on a whole other scale. “For a long time — it doesn’t hurt anymore — but for a long time,†Pittard tells me, “that phone call, and realizing a week later that she was talking about my husband, and that she’d gone out of her way to tell me that, I couldn’t parse the evil in that. I couldn’t parse it. It didn’t make sense to me. My brain sort of shut down.†It was, she says, a call that will never leave her. “I fucking hate being hoodwinked. And I hate being hoodwinked by people that I think I have a pretty good read on. And I was hoodwinked that day.â€
When I first mention any of this to Shearer, she’s somewhat dismissive, saying that she supposed the conversation depicted in We Are Too Many was intended to be one of the book’s imagined set pieces. “I wouldn’t have done that,†she says. I press that I feel sure Pittard believes that she remembers this quite specifically. “I mean, I don’t doubt she believes she remembers a lot of things,†responds Shearer. I press on, quoting to Shearer the above dialogue from the book. After I read the “babies†line, Shearer exclaims, “That’s disgusting. I would never say that.†Likewise, when I reach “I want him to put babies on me,†she says, “Oh, my God. I have never said that sentence in my life.â€
Pittard is infuriated to hear of this denial. “There are some things that I feel so certain of,†she says, “and one of them is this conversation.†Pittard at first assumed Shearer was talking about someone older whom they’d previously discussed. “I said, ‘You want to have babies with this guy?’ And she said, ‘No, it’s someone new — you don’t know him.’ And I asked his name and she said, ‘He’s our age.’â€
Somehow, this single issue seems the rawest of all, a proxy for everything else they will never agree on. As I go back and forth between them, the battle lines only harden, and any fragile sense of mutual respect seems to shatter.
“I think she’s just getting things mixed up,†says Shearer. “She probably put it in her book, and now she remembers it that way. That’s what writers do.â€
“I mean, it would be convenient for Hannah’s story to have that betrayal, is what I would say,†echoes Ewell. “If it’s convenient for her story, for her narrative, then I suppose she would have to believe it, wouldn’t she? I’m not trying to say she made something up. I think a creative mind hears things in strange and interesting and different ways.â€
In turn, Pittard’s affect is one of a long-simmering exhaustion. “It doesn’t matter to me anymore,†she says, “but I know that I’m right.â€
When you take someone real and place them inside a book, one way you may steer a reader before saying another word is by the name you call them. In various published and unpublished novels, stories, and drafts by the participants, these are the names used: Some version of Andrew Ewell is Percy Winters, Fred, Danny Winters, Stanley Lleweling, and Patrick (twice); Hannah Pittard is Debra Crawford, Elisabeth, Hannah, Hana, Minnie Grizwald, Penny Sneed, and Angela; Anna Shearer is Trish, Sophie Schiller, Maisie, Wanda, Emily Pruitt, and Georgia Pruitt; Ryan Fox is George, David, Mitchell, and John Reams.
Occasionally, such a name may have a sweetly private reference point — for instance, Shearer is called Sophie in Ewell’s novel, a name which relates to a circumstance from her first days on this planet. An early tale, you might say, of how the words we choose often have consequences we don’t see. After Shearer’s father, an emergency-room doctor, delivered her at home, her parents decided that her first name should be Anna and her middle name Sophie. So it was, until three months later her older sister, who had told her classmates of this new arrival to the family, rushed home with some disturbing news about what sweet baby Anna Sophie Shearer’s initials spelled out. Her middle name was quietly changed to Christina.
But sometimes a name carries a toxic charge — or at least that is how it may seem to those so renamed. Perhaps it’ll come as no surprise that those most affronted in this regard are Pittard and Shearer.
Shearer’s objection is to Pittard calling her Trish. When I meet Ewell, he has previewed her objections. “Trish is cheap, right?†he says. “It signifies sort of slutty or something. I mean, I think that’s a cheap low blow.â€
“Are we at the point where authors who go to private schools their whole life can make fun of people from West Virginia and call them out as being stupid and say they don’t have a good vocabulary and name them Trish?†Shearer, who is from just across the border, in Ohio, asks me. “Weirdly, everything else — the other woman, make it a mean girl, a little slut shame in there, whatever — I felt like I could deal with. For some odd reason, it’s that dig at being uneducated from West Virginia and just being an idiot because of where I’m from. That just burned a little bit.â€
Pittard is no more taken by the name Ewell chose for her.
“They named me Debra,†she says. “And I’m going to say ‘they’ because I think it was a joint conversation. I think of the two of them at breakfast, having coffee, going, ‘Dawn?’ ‘No.’ ‘Meg!’ ‘No,’ ‘Debra!!!’ And then the two of them just cackling. Did they know I’d hate it? They sure as fuck did. They might as well have named me Nell! And I bet you Nell was on their shortlist.â€
The first time Ewell and Pittard saw each other after their split, he visited her in Lexington and, as she remembers it, they went out for a long walk. When Pittard talked about this in a 2018 podcast, she related how there were both tears and laughter, but how then Ewell started to explain to her how awful it had been that he hadn’t been able to just call her up and tell her how funny Shearer was. Hadn’t been able to share, in other words, all his new excitement with the person he was used to sharing his excitements with.
At which point Pittard said she stopped him. She had something she needed to tell him right away. She had written a conversation in her new novel two days earlier, she told him, and it was important for Ewell to know, when the book came out, that the words she had written had not been taken from, or inspired by, this conversation they were now having. (Here, for reference, the relevant passage, on page 28 of Visible Empire: “Robert smacked his own forehead. ‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘that all I’ve wanted to tell Lily about for the past year is Rita? … Wouldn’t Lily die laughing if I told her what Rita said this afternoon? I couldn’t get Rita off my mind. She’s all I thought about. I wanted to talk about her. I wanted to talk about her to Lily because Lily is my best friend …’â€)
On the podcast, Pittard described what happened next: “He was like ‘This is why you’re fucking awful!’ And then we started fighting. But it’s true. I mean, this is why I am awful to be in a relationship with — that I’m able to, while I’m supposed to be having this really dramatic moment, step back and be like, ‘I just want to make sure you know, in two to three years, when this book that I’m working on finally comes out, this wasn’t your idea — it was already mine.’ He was like, ‘Are you fucking real?’â€
“I’m sure,†Pittard tells me, “that I did it in part also to hurt him and to undermine his experience. By saying, ‘I’ve already imagined the thing that you’re going through, and I’ve written it down — that’s how unoriginal you are.’â€
Just four friends who wanted to write: about themselves, and about one another, and about writing and being written about.
“That’s how things go,†Ewell says, “especially when you hang out with artistic people who have, you know, large egos and imaginations.â€
“The smallness will go away,†Pittard tells me, “because what will always linger is: I am so fucking lucky. I get to write. I would love for young people everywhere to get to experience art and conversation in this way. And, oh my God, let’s keep doing this and being frustrated by it for as long as we can. Let’s make eye contact. Let’s piss each other off. Let’s say, ‘You stole that from me’; ‘I stole this from you’; ‘That’s not true.’ Andrew and me, at the end of the day, we’re nothing. But are you kidding? I’d rather be a character in somebody else’s book than not acknowledged at all.â€
At one moment in my conversations with Ewell, I pointed out to him that most of the people reading this will not be writers. And that one of the questions they may well be pondering as they do so is whether people should be fearful of writers in their midst.
Yes, he said. “I think it would probably be wise.â€
Pittard told me that about six months into dating Clymer — as we talked, she and I were sitting in the living room of the house they share — he told her that he needed her never to write about him.
She described to me her reaction: “I was like, ‘I heard what you said.’ And what I had been thinking at the time — and this I have told him — was, ‘Yeah, this relationship isn’t going to last, because I write about the people in my life.’ But then we kept dating, and I didn’t have an immediate inclination to write about him. And there was a day where he came home and he said, apropos of nothing — I had not brought it up — he was like, ‘I trust you. You can write about me.’ And I was like, ‘Good. Because I’ve been thinking of some stories …’â€