Living Out Loud by Anna Quindlen

Author:Anna Quindlen [Quindlen, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-307-76354-9
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2011-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

FOOLING

AROUND

GOSSIP

So I’m reading about Joan Collins, who got married last year in Las Vegas to a man fourteen years her junior whose only resume description was “former Swedish pop star.” And I’m reading about Sylvester Stallone, who married a woman usually photographed wearing no more than the equivalent of a bandanna, who introduced herself by sending a photograph to his hotel room after she had ditched her baby and her first husband in Denmark. (I mean, what are they feeding them in Scandinavia? Human blood?) And I see that these people are getting divorced.

Somehow I am no more surprised than I was to hear that people claiming to be Elvis’s love children are sprouting like soybeans all over the South. As the Everly Brothers once said so wisely, love is strange. Particularly when you live in Hollywood.

Lifestyles of the Rich and Predictable—I love them. I read People magazine every week, and believe me, I don’t read it for those dumb Q and As about how stress can make you sick, or the pieces about the Johnsons, who run the biggest little pig farm in Iowa. I read it for Joan and Stallone and Farrah and Ryan and Tatum and Liz. I love the way these people live, because there’s such an incredible logic to it all: love children, the Betty Ford clinic, personal relationships with the spirit world. If you get married in Las Vegas and the groom wears white and carries a simple bouquet of premarital contracts, common sense tells you that a divorce will follow in very short order, and that someone will be represented by Marvin Mitchelson. You know what to expect from Liz Taylor’s life. First she shows up at something with a guy. Then she gets some large jewelry from the guy. Then she marries him. Then she divorces him.

Yes, these people lead lives with definition and norms. It’s the rest of us who have weird, off-the-wall ways. In my circle it is not totally uncommon for a man to come home one night after fourteen years of marriage, two children, two renovations, three attempts at the Scarsdale diet, a stint at Smokenders, and one midlife crisis, and say, without warning, on a day no better and no worse than thousands of others, “I don’t love you. I never loved you. I’m leaving.” And there you are, ditched by a person who is not even Scandinavian, with no jewelry, and no premarital contract, hit up side of the head.

In Hollywood, I am sure you would expect this. Your husband would open his mouth and before he got a word out you could just say, “I’m not stupid. I saw in the Star while I was in the supermarket line that Priscilla is having your love child.”

My husband is appalled—not by Joan’s ex-husband’s little passionflower or those wild accusations about Sly’s estranged wife and her secretary, but by the fact that I am interested in it all. He’s even threatened that if I abdicate my responsibilities

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