lynching louise lynch

Don't date a Writer. Just don't.

[And by "a Writer," I don't mean me, of course. You can date me. I'm just a writer. I write. I don't define myself by writing, I don't itch to write, I don't write-or-die. I just write... sometimes.]

I dated a Writer in college, and I loved his burning need to write. His passion for writing was the only thing I could really count on -- aside from his general unaccountability. But I just loved how he would turn a phrase or link three simple words together and change my world completely.

Lately, however, he's been changing my world again -- into his own fiction.

Seven years later, when the wounds are all healed (or at least scarred over enough not to hurt anymore), the Writer seems to be enjoying digging them back up again. And taking a little pin, and pricking the skin along the outline of the scar. For no reason that I can figure out. I'm finding out, fairly unpleasantly, that the way I loved this man, the things I did to show I cared for him, the help I gave him to keep him from the brink of seemingly endless disaster... well, he fictionally resents me for it.

His timing on this is odd and uncomfortable, as the multi-part story about the fictional me, Louise Lynch, comes just as he and his wife and I are reconnecting with one another. It's almost as if he has to paint Louise in an angry enough light to justify his being friendly with Kate.

I know that the question to look at is not why the Writer is doing this -- he was an emotional scab-picker by nature when I knew him well -- but why does his doing it bother me so much? Partly because it's never fun to see your ex-relationships from someone else's point of view (where you're not actually the hero of them) and partly because some of the way he paints the picture is patently untrue.

But it's fiction.

Or is it?
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4 (skip to about 2/3 through the piece)