If there's an up side to your ex-wife's best-seller...

Apparently, Elizabeth Gilbert's ex-husband, Michael Cooper, has sold a memoir of his own, Displaced, scheduled for release in fall of 2010.  According to Sunday's NYT book review, it's supposed to be "a book chronicling his side of their breakup and his own 'search for purpose' in the Middle East and beyond."

I am a fan of Gilbert's The Last American Man, a lively and insightful piece of narrative nonfiction, and I like Gilbert's writing.  Still, I imagine that for the ex-husband it can't have been pleasant to have Eat, Pray, Love, his former wife's tale of leaving their marriage and finding spiritual peace and romantic/sexual fulfillment (also, a lot of good food in Italy) vault to everywhere-I-turn-it's-there best-sellerdom.  And a movie in the works to boot!

Bound to rankle, wouldn't you say?  Rubbing salt in the wound. 

But now he has his own book in the making, and from a publicity POV he has this going for him--as an article in the Guardian notes:

Public interest in Cooper's side of the story is likely to be enormous. Eat, Pray, Love struck a chord with many readers, the vast majority of them women, in part because it did not flinch from personal disclosures. That potentially creates a market of millions.

"Readers have connected so strongly with Gilbert's book that they will probably see this book too in a very sympathetic light. People clearly want to know about the men in her life," said [Carolyn] Kellogg [of Jacket Copy, the book blog of the Los Angeles Times].

We do not yet know, of course, how or whether he will weigh in on the subject of the marriage's dissolution, but I fear he is doomed to being identified in reviews and other coverage of the book as "Michael Cooper, ex-husband of Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the best-selling Eat, Pray, Love" (with possible additional reference to "the movie starring Julia Roberts"). And of course in every interview he's going to be asked about his reaction to Gilbert's book and its success.

From a writer's perspective, it would be a tough call whether or not, were I in Cooper's place, I'd include in my book a chapter or two on the now all-too-famous end of my marriage. I think I'd go for the elliptical reference and focus on my own story:  "When my wife left me, I was angry then sad then decided to go to the  Middle East."  Well, I condense, but you get the point. 

However, the business of the book business is to sell books, and I'm willing to bet that the marketer's perspective is that, like it or not, riding Gilbert's coat-tails is the way to sell Cooper's book, that "I'm the guy Elizabeth Gilbert left" is Cooper's "platform."  The gazillion women who read and loved E,P,L are, as Kellogg noted in the Guardian quote, a big, ready-made market for Cooper's book.  But Cooper will have to be very careful in how he writes about Gilbert and the breakup in the book, so he doesn't risk alienating the E,P,L-loving first readers of his book, who, in these days of Twitter, could sink Cooper's book almost before it hits the shelves.  I don't envy him his writer's challenge here--it's hard enough to write without all those considerations hanging over your every word and paragraph.

So I think I'd still focus on my reactions more than her actions.  ("I didn't want her to leave.  I didn't want her to sell the house because with it would go the dream I thought we shared and the future I still wanted to believe we would have together."  etc.)

And then, just ahead or right around the release date of Cooper's book, he should do a personal essay piece somewhere like Salon that's ruefully tongue-in-cheek about the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position of writing your own memoir when you're contemporary literature's most famous ex-husband.  

Comments

[Richard Gilbert]

Thanks--this is fascinating. His problem as a writer does appear structural (isn't it always!?) and complicated, as you say, by the very thing that makes his book newsworthy.

But he is freed, OTOH, from what felt to me, as I neared the end of Eat, Pray, a disingenuous premise. That is, I felt somewhat betrayed, inferring that she'd really had her significant transformation on the earlier trip she writes about at the end, and then pitched a book idea to relive it on a bestselling scale. This does not invalidate her accomplishment or her great skill, but it made Eat, Pray feel less honest to me, more an artful construct, a project.

As any writer knows, the work shapes life and takes on a life of its own, so I don't mean to say her book is false. I just wonder if it would have hurt the book if she had admitted its writerly, practical aspect more up front?