February 20, 2025 • 39 mins
In Part 2 of Hannah’s story, we explore what happens to shared memories.
You can find Hannah’s latest books here: We Are Too Many: A Memoir If You Love It, Let It Kill You: A Novel
If you would like to reach out to the Betrayal Team, email us at betrayalpod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram at @betrayalpod
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
It is a pretty surreal experience to read about yourself
in third person, something that has been written by a
former lover in which you're murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. This is part two of Hannah's story. If
you haven't heard part one, you should go back and
listen to that first. It was the night before the
launch of Hannah's third novel. She was crashing at her
(00:50):
friend Hughes place in New York. Her husband Patrick had
stayed with him the week before. Hannah and Hugh were
up late talking and out of the blue, h made
a string. He said that Hannah should.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Be more suspicious of people in her life.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And I said, is this about Patrick? And he said yes.
And I said did something happen when Patrick was in
New York last week without me? And he said yes.
At this point, my heart just dropped and I feel
like I'm in a vomit. I said, did Patrick have
(01:25):
sex with someone? And Hugh said yes. And I said
did he have sex with Trish? And he said yes.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Her husband Patrick had an affair with Trish, her best
friend from grad school, the same woman who set them
up in the first place.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I think if it had been a stranger, it would
have been a really unfortunate cry for help. But when
he chose the person that I've had like second most
intimate conversations with in my life, that clouded anything that
(02:06):
we might have recovered.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Out of all the people he could have cheated with,
he chose Trish, Hannah's first true friend, her confidante.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
But Trisha chose Patrick too.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Her betrayal felt so intentional and possibly like it was
a long time coming.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
She thought back to the early days of their friend group,
like that night when Trish reminded Hannah that Trish and
Patrick were friends first. But Hannah had never worried about
Trish and Patrick's dynamic.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It didn't matter because she was married, and more importantly,
it didn't matter because I knew Patrick worshiped me.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Now Hannah was questioning everything she knew about the two
most important people in her life. It was devastating, but
sitting in Hugh's apartment, Hannah was numb.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I said, I have to make a phone call. I'll
be right back, and I went up to his roof
and I called my sister and I said, guess who's
having an affair.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Hannah told her sister everything she knew and then went
right into planning mode.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
She was like, what do you need me to do?
And I said, I just need you to, you know,
keep your phone charged and if you could handle like
telling mom, I'm not taking phone calls right now.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
She needed to compartmentalize and be alone. She hung up
the phone and walked back down to Hugh's apartment.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
He's like, did you did you talk to Patrick? And
I said no, no. I called my sister and he
was like, what are you going to do next? And
I was like, well, right now, I'm going to go
to bed because I've got a book launch tomorrow, so
let's do that. And I could tell that I was
freaking him out because I wasn't crying.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Tomorrow was a big day. She just needed to get
through the night. She went to bed, still trying to
wrap her head around the news.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I woke up, just bolt upright awake at five in
the morning, sat in bed, waited till six hughes alarm
went off. He got up, was like, how are you
And I said, I'm fine. I'm going to make a
phone call here in a second, He's like, Okay, I'm
going to take a shower. And the person I called
was Trish. Whatever the reason, she was the person I
(04:37):
felt like I needed to confront.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
It was six o five in the morning and Trish
picked up the phone.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
She said, hey, hey, you're in New York right and
I said yeah, and she said I'll see you tonight
at the book launch and I said yep, uh huh.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Almost immediately, Trish could sense that something was wrong. She
asked her what was going on.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And I said, well, I think something's happened to Patrick
and she said, oh, no, is he okay? And I said, no,
I don't think he is okay. I think he's had
sex with someone. And she said no, who do you
think it is? And I said, I think he had
sex with you and she said no, why do you
(05:21):
think that? And I said, if you're gonna lie, I'm
not doing this and I hung up the phone. She
called me back thirty seconds later.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Trish admitted it she and George weren't really together anymore so.
The week before, when Patrick was in town, the two
of them slept together.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Trish explained, she said he did this to drive a
wedge between us, and I said no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
And when Hannah didn't buy that, she.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Said, he told me that you've always been jealous of me.
And I said no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Trish was grasping at straws.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I was so clear minded. I just kept my wits
about help me. And I didn't cry and I didn't yell.
And I said, thank you for letting me know, by
the way, you are not to come tonight. If I
see you, I will lose my shit.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
With that, Hannah ended the call. By this time, it
wasn't even six thirty in the morning. Hugh left for work,
leaving her alone in the apartment, and it was around
noon when she got a call from Patrick.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
He said, well, I heard you talked to Trish and
I said yes, and he said so and I said, okay,
I'll do the work. Did you have sex with Trish?
He said yes, more than once. Yes. Do you think
you're in love with her? Yes? I said, thank you
so much for being honest with me. I will see
(06:48):
a lawyer on Monday. I want the house, I want
the car, I want the dog. He said, did you
rehearse that? And I said nope, but it's pretty good,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Patrick told her he was getting on the next trained
to New York to talk things out, but Hannah was
done trying to fix things.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
There is nothing to talk about. You had sex with
a person who introduced us, the person I consider my
best friend. I will never have sex with a man
who has had sex with her. There's literally nothing to discuss.
And he said, well, we'll talk about it when I
come home. And at this point, still not crying, I
did become somewhat like laughing hysterical. I was like, ho, ho,
(07:27):
you don't have a home anymore. If you are anywhere
near me tonight, I will scream.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Hannah was surprisingly calm. After all, she still had her
book launch that night. She needed to stay on autopilot.
She didn't have time to grieve. After she got off
the phone with Patrick, she kept moving.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I had five hours to kill and I was getting
a divorce, and I wanted to go shopping, And so
I went shopping and I bought myself a brand new
miniskirt and a brand new top.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She tried not to think about Trish and Patrick, but
as she walked around New York, I.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Had a sudden fear about STDs and so I sent
the two of them a text message and I said,
I need to know if I need to get an
STD test. And she wrote me back and she said, no,
I told you, it just happened. We didn't realize what
(08:30):
close friends we were. And she started texting me this
really long text message, and at some point Patrick wrote,
stop texting Trish.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Trish wasn't the only one blowing up Hannah's phone.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I'm getting phone calls from Patrick's parents saying no, no, no,
you guys are going to work this out. And I
was like, no, no, no, Let me buy my miniskirt,
go back to Hugh's apartment. Change.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
And then she went to her book launch. Despite the
day she had. The event went well. She got up
on stage and read from her new novel, acting as
if nothing was wrong. Afterwards, her agent and editor asked
her to go out and celebrate. They had no idea
about the affair, so Hannah told them.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And both of them just stared at me for a
second and they were like, wait, why are you here?
And I was like, well, I'm here because I had
a book launch and they're like, oh, but you were
so funny just now on stage, and I was like yeah,
and they were like oh. No.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
One knew what to say to her, mostly because on
the outside she seemed fine, good even still, she wanted
to be around her people that night, so she went
out with Hugh and a couple of her other friends.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
We had this great dinner and nobody is talking about it.
And then finally, at like midnight, I mean, the restaurant's
still open. We've had a couple bottles of wine. Hugh
said something, and I just started bawling. And then Hugh said, Okay,
(10:13):
there it is. There we go.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
All of the emotions, the sadness, hurt, anger, confusion hit it.
Once the floodgates were finally open. She was still crying
at three am.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
When Patrick called me again, and he was crying. He
had gotten on a train and he had come to
New York City and he was calling me from Trisha's apartment.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Hannah had just found out that her husband had been
having an affair with her best friend in a twenty
four hour period. She confronted both of them, asked for
a divorce, and launched a novel. It had been one
of the longest days of Hannah's life. And then at
three am, the phone rang it was her husband Patrick.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He was with Trish and they'd been drinking, and I
could not believe that he was calling me from her apartment.
He wanted to talk to me about how dramatic I'd
been and how we would talk about this.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
He told Hannah that their marriage could survive this. All
the while Trish, the woman he said he loved just
hours before, was in the next room. It was clear
to Hannah that no matter what promises Patrick made, he.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Was going to continue seeing her.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Hannah told Patrick to give her space, so Patrick's stay
to New York to figure things out, and he stayed
with Trish. Meanwhile, Hannah had to keep going. She needed
to keep promoting her book. The next morning, she left
for DC for another book reading, but now she was
having trouble holding it all together.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
On the train ride down, I couldn't stop crying. I
was so disgusting. I had to get clothes out of
my luggage. So I pull out this shirt and I'm
wiping my face with it, and I feel like I
look like I'm contagious. And the train is packed, and
there's this lovely man and he's got this gorgeous suit on,
like beautifully put together perfect specimen of New York City
(12:43):
sitting next to me, and I am trying so hard
to make myself small, and I just keep leaning closer
and closer to the window because I am so disgusting.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
The whole ride down, Patrick continued to text and call
her she was falling apart. Those around her couldn't help.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
But notice in Philly, this man stands up, who I
have just assumed I am like a leoper to this guy.
And he gets his bag and I think, finally I
can spread out and be gross and not worry about
touching anyone. And he puts his hand on my shoulder
and I really thought he was gonna yell at me
or say like, do you know how disgusting you are?
(13:24):
And I looked up at him and he said, I said,
whatever it is, it's gonna be okay. And if it's not,
there are probably people who love you.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
And I just like lost it all over again because
he was so nice, he was so generous, and when
he said that, I just thought, I love people. People
are just the most amazing things in the world. He
was such a gift.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
It was a moment of kindness when she needed it
the most. After DC Hannah finally went back home to Kentucky,
and as promised, she saw a divorce attorney right away.
Patrick was in denial.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
He kept insisting that the marriage wasn't over, and I
just kept moving forward as much as I could.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
But eventually Patrick had to come back to Kentucky because he.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Still had a job at the same school where I
was working.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
It was difficult to fully disentangle their lives. For ten years,
they'd built their worlds around each other.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Until we weren't. We'd always been sort of connected at
the hip. You know, all of our colleagues would say,
you guys do everything together. You're always together.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Even though she was putting one foot in front of
the other, she was taking the divorce really hard.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Patrick had been her person.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
She missed him, and she didn't have the luxury of
space from him. She still ran into him on campus.
So a few months after the divorce was finalized, they
started grabbing coffee.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We were able to maintain some amount of a friendship
for a little while.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It felt a little like those early days when the
two of them were just friends, playing scrabble and coffee shops.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
They would talk about how.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Things were going in their careers. As months went by,
they even began talking about their new relationships. Hannah started
dating another professor at their university, and Patrick remained with Trish.
One time, he invited Hannah to grab drinks with him
and Trish.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
And of course I was thinking, this is great. I'm
just going to show them that I do not care.
So I got drinks with them, and when it was over,
they went to another bar and I offered them a ride,
dropped them off, and I went home.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Looking back, she's still confused as to why she said yes,
because practically no time had passed between their divorce and
their friend and soon boundaries began to blur. Patrick started
making a lot of requests of Hannah. Once, in the
middle of the night, he called her on a drive.
He was on his way to see Trish.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
He was crying and I asked him if he was
safe to drive and if he needed to pull over,
and he said, I just need you to promise me
that we're always going to be friends, because if it's
we can't be friends, if I stay with her, I'll
break up with her. I need you in my life.
And I said, don't break up with her. We'll always
be friends. And I knew that I was lying. I
(16:36):
told him what I thought he needed to hear in
order to be safe.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It was an unhealthy friendship, but it did have one rule.
Hannah made Patrick promise that if things ever got serious
with him and Trish, he would tell her.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I never wanted to hear about something secondhand, and he
said that he would never let that happen.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
He promised. Then the following Christmas.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
My sister pulled me aside and said, I have to
tell you something, Trisian. Patrick got married, and I wanted
to be the one to tell you, because it was
pretty clear that he wasn't going to tell you. When
classes resumed that spring, he sent me an email and said, coffee,
(17:28):
you know, like we had been doing. And I said sure,
And I assumed that at this coffee he would tell
me that they'd gotten married. And I met him for
coffee and we talked for an hour and he was
wearing the ring, but he never said a word. He
never told me. I left thinking, whatever we just did, whatever,
(17:53):
Like weird anti flirtation that we're doing with him wearing
a ring and us laughing in a coffee shop while
he's not telling me. The most hurtful thing. I just
didn't need it.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
It felt manipulative, cowardly, and it was hurting her. She
was finally ready to cut him off. Throughout their whole separation,
Hannah seemed to be doing really well.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Everyone would say, Oh, you're so much lighter now, you're
letting yourself have fun again. Everyone said that I was
just so much better, and I told them they were right,
that I was just so happy and it was such
a relief.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
She would smile and agree, but in reality, that couldn't
be further from the truth.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
This was when my eating disorder came back. I'd been
with Patrick for ten years, and I'd forgotten how to
eat by myself, how to do a meal alone, So
it was really easy to you go into starvation mode.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Hannah's writing also took a hit. She was under contract
to write a fourth novel. It was the first time
in her career where she couldn't meet her deadlines.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When I was writing this fourth book, I was very
aware of Hannah sitting at desk in front of computer,
making character move from point A to point B in
order to get to the next plot. Ce that made
me feel terrible.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Her doctor was the first person to notice that Hannah
wasn't doing as well as she said.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
She said, are you getting any sleep? And I was like, yeah,
when I take you know, trazy doone and clonipin and
a couple glasses of wine. And she said, that's not sleeping,
that's passing out.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
She recommended that hannah' see a therapist, and Hannah knew
she was right. So for the next year, Hannah threw
herself into therapy and had some major breakthroughs. She'd been
so isolated as a child that she never learned how
to build healthy relationships.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
And I'm like, well, what do I do if I
don't like this girl that I'm friends with? My therapist
was like, so you don't like the girl, don't see her?
And I'm like, well, what do I do if I'm
dating a guy and I just want to break up
with him and I don't have a reason. She's like,
you break up with him? And I was like, oh,
I think because of my parents' divorce and because of
(20:28):
the trauma of that custody battle, I'd missed out on
just some certain everyday basics.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
It had been three years since the divorce and she
was still with that professor at her university. This relationship
also helped her heal. He had a young daughter and
together they formed a little family.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
And in twenty nineteen and November we bought a house together,
having never lived together before, so we did it all
at once. His daughter moves in, he moves in, I
move in, and then like three months later, COVID hit.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
During COVID, Hannah had more time than ever to focus
on her writing and to reflect on her divorce. But
she wasn't writing her usual fiction.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
New ideas just.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Weren't coming to her. Instead, she kept revisiting real conversations.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
The conversations between Trish and Patrick and George and me,
and the conversations with my family and grad school. There
was something about that isolation and being sequestered in this
house that brought it all back. It was during that
time where I thought, Okay, I'm not over it, because
(21:42):
I'm still thinking about it. Let's just get it out
of me.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So she started writing it all down, every conversation she
couldn't get out of her head, memories of Trish from
early days of their friendship, things she'd wish she'd said
to Patrick, or that Patrick had said to her, scenes
from the life they'd built and knocked down together.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And then it accidentally became something that I thought could
be shared with the world, and then that turned into
my memoir.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
She named the book We Are Too Many a memoir
kind of She wanted it to be an honest attempt
at capturing a marriage gone wrong. If she was going
to write about her divorce and all the real people involved,
she wanted to get it right.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I was such a part of it that fictional words
did not exist for what I had gone through, and
I just thought the stakes are so low in fiction.
But then when I made it us, I.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Cared, even in sections that were entirely made up, like
imagined conversations between Patrick and Trish. She tried to paint
these people as they really were.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
He can be dismissive, he can be condescending, but when
he is charming, and when he shines that charm on you,
it's quite lovely. I wanted to capture that complicated character.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
There's no hero in the story.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Every character shares Blaine herself included.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
In early drafts. I almost always got what I wanted
to say correct, and I almost always gave myself the
upper hand and the punchline and I realized I had
to go through and get rid of all the bullshit.
(23:39):
I think I did a pretty good job being honest
about how demanding I can be. I was unpleasant, especially
towards the end when I was mad.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
She also made it clear that she was only writing
from her perspective. These were, as she writes in her introduction,
imperfectly recollected exchanges. She was only telling her version of
the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I was never attempting to pretend that I had a
recorder with me. The whole time. I was just trying
to get out of my head these things that I
kept coming back to.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
But three years after beginning her memoir, and just as
Hannah was about to announce her book to the world,
she got an email from her agent.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
And the subject was have you seen this? And I
opened it, and I read it, and I read it again,
and I wasn't able to really make sense of what
I was reading, because what I was reading was a
synopsis of my husband's affair, our divorce, and our life
(24:46):
together as it imploded. And it was an announcement for
my ex husband's debut novel.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Hannah was about to announce her fifth book, a memoir
about her divorce. Throughout their marriage, Hannah's husband Patrick had
struggled to get published himself. He'd often relied on Hannah professionally,
and now his first book is about the affair.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I had a million feelings all at once. I was
so happy for him. I was also so mad at him.
This is how you're going to get published. Finally it's
going to be about us.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
At first glance, Hannah thought her ex husband had written
a memoir to a truthful account of what he'd done
to blow up their marriage. Confused, she sent a screenshot
to a friend and she was.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Like, oh, sweetie, it's a novel. And I said, no, no, no,
but this all happened. Everything in the description happened. And
she said, and he's written a novel about your marriage.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
In her book, Hannah was confronting her role in her
marriage and its breakdown. She wrote Patrick as a real person,
someone with flaws and strengths. Her memoir was nonfiction. Still,
at the end of her book, people would know that
this was only her version of events, but he was
writing fiction. He was taking their real story and passing
(26:29):
it off as made up. Fiction writers often use material
from their real life as inspiration Hannah certainly did, but
this felt different. She worried how would he paint what happened,
how would he paint her? She wanted to gather as
much information as she could ahead of his novel's release.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
So for the first time in six years, I googled him.
I was looking for news of his novel. I wanted
to know anything I could. I couldn't find it but
a link to one short story that he'd written and
published in twenty nineteen, and I sat at the kitchen
table across from my boyfriend as I read this short story.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The narrator of the story seemed a lot like Hannah's
ex husband, and the story was about him having an
affair with his wife's best friend. He gets divorced an
Remarri's sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
And in the story there's very clearly a me character.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
There were scenes from their real life, down to the
details of his trip to New York and the phone
call confrontation about their affair. There were also details that
mirrored Hannah's career, the guy Hannah was dating, and even
weird details like how she's slept with a can of
pepper spray under her mattress, which the real Hannah did
(27:52):
during her marriage to Patrick. In the story, the narrator
is in the hospital with his new wife. Their ten
month old baby.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Is extremely ill.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
While he's at the hospital, he's thinking about his ex
wife who's just died.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
The me character gets knife to death by a homeless person.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
The scene is pretty violent.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
She pulls over and she tries to help this homeless
guy who's on a bridge. She had had a couple
of glasses of wine, and he kills her, knife's her
to death. And that's sort of how those story ends.
That he's in the hospital thinking about his dead ex
wife and about to go be reunited with his new
(28:36):
wife and their new baby, and how he never got
the chance to tell the me of the story that
they had a baby in the first place.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Hannah was at a loss for words. She was sitting
at her kitchen table reading about her imagined death.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
It is a pretty surreal experience to read about yourself
in third person, something that has been written by a
former lover, in which you're murdered. I was both amused, terrified, outraged,
(29:16):
and flu mixed that this story had been in the
world for three years without me knowing.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
As she always did in big moments.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
She called her sister.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
I said, my ex husband murdered me And she said what,
And I said three years ago, and I've been walking
around with no idea that I'm even dead.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Hannah could have allowed this revelation to take her to
a dark place. It definitely concerned a lot of people
in her life.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
I have a couple close female friends who were really worried,
and my family thought it was pretty creepy.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
But if this was what he wrote in a short story,
what was he going to say in his forthcoming novel?
Speaker 3 (30:00):
It gave her anxiety.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Knowing that there's a book in the world there is
going to be a version of me. It is going
to be a portrayal that I cannot like, And just
knowing that there was nothing I could do made me
feel slightly out of control and a little bit crazy.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Who was she in this book of his? Hannah had
taken great care to try to write him truthfully. How
would he write her?
Speaker 1 (30:31):
I had a lot of serious conversations with my partner
now about whether or not I should read it, whether
or not he should read it.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Patrick's novel came out two years after the announcement and
a year after her memoir was released, she asked a
few trusted friends to give it a read.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
They said, it's unflattering, it's ungenerous, you're smug, you're insecure,
and some amount of fun is being made of your body.
That I was being portrayed with such a caricature, I thought, Yeah,
that doesn't sound like something I need to read.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Hannah did read the preview on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Though, and it was more than enough.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
In the first few pages, she recognized the character that
was supposed to be her, but it wasn't her at all.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Like she said, it was a caricature.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
She's obsessed with her careers. She's obsessed with sales. She
writes books while walking her dog and talking to her
sister and watching TV. She's like hopping around the kitchen
talking to NPR while in her sweatsuit and making like
a smoothie or something. She's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
To this day, Patrick consists that his book is entirely fictional.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
He is to the world saying, this is fiction, this
is a novel. It has nothing to do with my life.
But he has given very very real, very factual scenarios
to the book.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
And at the same time, there's a clear connection between
their two books. When someone searches for Patrick or his
books on Amazon, Hannah's book is one of the top results.
Hannah doesn't know for sure, but she wonders if that
was an intentional move by his team.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Because there's a story there, right, and stories sell books.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Instead of staying angry, Hannah decided to do what she
does best, right, and so she flipped the script.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I just thought, wouldn't it be funny if I wrote
a book about my ex husband writing a book about me.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
When Patrick wrote his novel, he reduced Hannah to a
two dimensional character, a cartoon. It was infuriating and humiliating,
and she decided to use those emotions to write.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
And I wrote a little scene in which there's this
woman sitting across the table from her boyfriend and she
reads this story in which she's been murdered by her ex.
And I started laughing after I wrote it, and my
boyfriend says, what are you laughing at? And I read
it to him and he said, that's funny. And then
I just kept writing these things.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Pretty soon the book took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
The book became something so much bigger and different than
just being like a revenge book, it became a book
about what it's like to be a middle aged woman
navigating this world.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
The book falls somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction, in
a genre called auto fiction. Hannah actually got the idea
to pursue auto fiction from her ex husband.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
I did not know what auto fiction was until I
read my ex husband's debut announcement in which the ex
wife is working on auto fiction, and at that point
in my career, I did not know this expression. It
was driving me crazy, and I started looking into auto fiction,
and I thought it was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Auto Fiction is rooted in real people and real events,
but it gives writers the freedom to play with reality
for the sake of a compelling story.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's so great. I basically just get to imagine myself
doing all the crazy things that I do in my
head but never out in the world.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Unlike Patrick, she was explicit with her readers about drawing
on true events. For example, in her new book, a
woman named Hannah is living with her boyfriend and his daughter,
just as she does in real life.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
And she gets the news that her ex husband is
publishing a book in which a very unflattering portrayal of
herself is prominently featured being out of control and having
been turned into a character without permission. It's something that
she's suddenly focused on and questioning. We watch her as
(35:08):
she tries to figure out what's fair and what's not
fair and what do you do with shared memories.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Hannah thinks a lot about these ethical questions around shared memories.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
If you've got two artists or two writers who share
these memories, of course they're going to be distorted. Even
when you have two people who love each other and
are still together and they're in a room, they're experiencing
something different. And so I love the complication of what
you do with the shared custody of memories.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Today, Hannah's doing much better. She's in recovery from her
eating disorder. It's still something she carries with her.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I think I'm so proud of being on the other
side of it that I will never let myself get
back there.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
In many ways, she now feels grateful for what she
went through.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
It took so long to be honest with what I
wanted because I was so determined to please other people
and to attempt to fit into a particular type of
package to be palatable to be forgiving enough, to be sweet,
(36:27):
to not cause problems getting a divorce, and re examining
my life and making a conscious decision to figure out
what I do and don't want out of my life,
articulating my desires. That entire process was magical.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
The end all of our episodes with the same question,
why do you want to tell your story?
Speaker 1 (37:02):
We tell stories to make connections. I teach kids who
are eighteen to twenty six every day how to tell stories,
and one of the things that I'm always telling them
is we tell stories to make connections. And my divorce
was a major disconnection for me, and it was a
(37:23):
disconnection from the two people I thought I cared most
about in my life. And the story that I'm telling
I don't think is unique. In fact, I think maybe
that's one of the reasons that I want to tell it.
I don't think it's something to be ashamed of. I
don't think that being the person who's been cheated on
means you should hide in a corner. And by telling it,
(37:48):
I have the opportunity to make a connection, and I
also have an opportunity to inspire somebody else to want
to tell their own version of the same story.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
On the next episode of Betrayal. It's not like he's
a catch me if you can type person. He actually
lies to make himself as normal as possible, just like
your average bloke. If you would like to reach out
(38:26):
to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail
dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com, and
be sure to follow us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
We're grateful for your support.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
review Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Five star reviews go.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
A long way. A big thank you to all of
our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a
division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
With iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The show is executive produced by Nana Glass and Jennifer Fasin,
hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning. This episode was
written and produced by Kitlyn Golden and Monique le Board,
with additional production by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin
Mercury and Caitlyn Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry
and Jessica Kriinchech. Audio editing and mixing by mattel Vecchio,
(39:22):
additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music and For
more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts from
It is a pretty surreal experience to read about yourself
in third person, something that has been written by a
former lover in which you're murdered.
Speaker 2 (00:29):
I'm Andrea Gunning and this is Betrayal, a show about
the people we trust the most and the deceptions that
change everything. This is part two of Hannah's story. If
you haven't heard part one, you should go back and
listen to that first. It was the night before the
launch of Hannah's third novel. She was crashing at her
(00:50):
friend Hughes place in New York. Her husband Patrick had
stayed with him the week before. Hannah and Hugh were
up late talking and out of the blue, h made
a string. He said that Hannah should.
Speaker 3 (01:02):
Be more suspicious of people in her life.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
And I said, is this about Patrick? And he said yes.
And I said did something happen when Patrick was in
New York last week without me? And he said yes.
At this point, my heart just dropped and I feel
like I'm in a vomit. I said, did Patrick have
(01:25):
sex with someone? And Hugh said yes. And I said
did he have sex with Trish? And he said yes.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
Her husband Patrick had an affair with Trish, her best
friend from grad school, the same woman who set them
up in the first place.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
I think if it had been a stranger, it would
have been a really unfortunate cry for help. But when
he chose the person that I've had like second most
intimate conversations with in my life, that clouded anything that
(02:06):
we might have recovered.
Speaker 2 (02:10):
Out of all the people he could have cheated with,
he chose Trish, Hannah's first true friend, her confidante.
Speaker 3 (02:19):
But Trisha chose Patrick too.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
Her betrayal felt so intentional and possibly like it was
a long time coming.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
She thought back to the early days of their friend group,
like that night when Trish reminded Hannah that Trish and
Patrick were friends first. But Hannah had never worried about
Trish and Patrick's dynamic.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
It didn't matter because she was married, and more importantly,
it didn't matter because I knew Patrick worshiped me.
Speaker 2 (02:54):
Now Hannah was questioning everything she knew about the two
most important people in her life. It was devastating, but
sitting in Hugh's apartment, Hannah was numb.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
I said, I have to make a phone call. I'll
be right back, and I went up to his roof
and I called my sister and I said, guess who's
having an affair.
Speaker 2 (03:18):
Hannah told her sister everything she knew and then went
right into planning mode.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
She was like, what do you need me to do?
And I said, I just need you to, you know,
keep your phone charged and if you could handle like
telling mom, I'm not taking phone calls right now.
Speaker 2 (03:38):
She needed to compartmentalize and be alone. She hung up
the phone and walked back down to Hugh's apartment.
Speaker 1 (03:45):
He's like, did you did you talk to Patrick? And
I said no, no. I called my sister and he
was like, what are you going to do next? And
I was like, well, right now, I'm going to go
to bed because I've got a book launch tomorrow, so
let's do that. And I could tell that I was
freaking him out because I wasn't crying.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Tomorrow was a big day. She just needed to get
through the night. She went to bed, still trying to
wrap her head around the news.
Speaker 1 (04:13):
I woke up, just bolt upright awake at five in
the morning, sat in bed, waited till six hughes alarm
went off. He got up, was like, how are you
And I said, I'm fine. I'm going to make a
phone call here in a second, He's like, Okay, I'm
going to take a shower. And the person I called
was Trish. Whatever the reason, she was the person I
(04:37):
felt like I needed to confront.
Speaker 2 (04:39):
It was six o five in the morning and Trish
picked up the phone.
Speaker 1 (04:44):
She said, hey, hey, you're in New York right and
I said yeah, and she said I'll see you tonight
at the book launch and I said yep, uh huh.
Speaker 2 (04:52):
Almost immediately, Trish could sense that something was wrong. She
asked her what was going on.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
And I said, well, I think something's happened to Patrick
and she said, oh, no, is he okay? And I said, no,
I don't think he is okay. I think he's had
sex with someone. And she said no, who do you
think it is? And I said, I think he had
sex with you and she said no, why do you
(05:21):
think that? And I said, if you're gonna lie, I'm
not doing this and I hung up the phone. She
called me back thirty seconds later.
Speaker 2 (05:28):
Trish admitted it she and George weren't really together anymore so.
The week before, when Patrick was in town, the two
of them slept together.
Speaker 1 (05:39):
Trish explained, she said he did this to drive a
wedge between us, and I said no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (05:46):
And when Hannah didn't buy that, she.
Speaker 1 (05:48):
Said, he told me that you've always been jealous of me.
And I said no, no, no, no no.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Trish was grasping at straws.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
I was so clear minded. I just kept my wits
about help me. And I didn't cry and I didn't yell.
And I said, thank you for letting me know, by
the way, you are not to come tonight. If I
see you, I will lose my shit.
Speaker 2 (06:12):
With that, Hannah ended the call. By this time, it
wasn't even six thirty in the morning. Hugh left for work,
leaving her alone in the apartment, and it was around
noon when she got a call from Patrick.
Speaker 1 (06:26):
He said, well, I heard you talked to Trish and
I said yes, and he said so and I said, okay,
I'll do the work. Did you have sex with Trish?
He said yes, more than once. Yes. Do you think
you're in love with her? Yes? I said, thank you
so much for being honest with me. I will see
(06:48):
a lawyer on Monday. I want the house, I want
the car, I want the dog. He said, did you
rehearse that? And I said nope, but it's pretty good,
isn't it.
Speaker 2 (06:58):
Patrick told her he was getting on the next trained
to New York to talk things out, but Hannah was
done trying to fix things.
Speaker 1 (07:05):
There is nothing to talk about. You had sex with
a person who introduced us, the person I consider my
best friend. I will never have sex with a man
who has had sex with her. There's literally nothing to discuss.
And he said, well, we'll talk about it when I
come home. And at this point, still not crying, I
did become somewhat like laughing hysterical. I was like, ho, ho,
(07:27):
you don't have a home anymore. If you are anywhere
near me tonight, I will scream.
Speaker 2 (07:39):
Hannah was surprisingly calm. After all, she still had her
book launch that night. She needed to stay on autopilot.
She didn't have time to grieve. After she got off
the phone with Patrick, she kept moving.
Speaker 1 (07:53):
I had five hours to kill and I was getting
a divorce, and I wanted to go shopping, And so
I went shopping and I bought myself a brand new
miniskirt and a brand new top.
Speaker 2 (08:04):
She tried not to think about Trish and Patrick, but
as she walked around New York, I.
Speaker 1 (08:09):
Had a sudden fear about STDs and so I sent
the two of them a text message and I said,
I need to know if I need to get an
STD test. And she wrote me back and she said, no,
I told you, it just happened. We didn't realize what
(08:30):
close friends we were. And she started texting me this
really long text message, and at some point Patrick wrote,
stop texting Trish.
Speaker 2 (08:39):
Trish wasn't the only one blowing up Hannah's phone.
Speaker 1 (08:42):
I'm getting phone calls from Patrick's parents saying no, no, no,
you guys are going to work this out. And I
was like, no, no, no, Let me buy my miniskirt,
go back to Hugh's apartment. Change.
Speaker 2 (08:57):
And then she went to her book launch. Despite the
day she had. The event went well. She got up
on stage and read from her new novel, acting as
if nothing was wrong. Afterwards, her agent and editor asked
her to go out and celebrate. They had no idea
about the affair, so Hannah told them.
Speaker 1 (09:18):
And both of them just stared at me for a
second and they were like, wait, why are you here?
And I was like, well, I'm here because I had
a book launch and they're like, oh, but you were
so funny just now on stage, and I was like yeah,
and they were like oh. No.
Speaker 2 (09:37):
One knew what to say to her, mostly because on
the outside she seemed fine, good even still, she wanted
to be around her people that night, so she went
out with Hugh and a couple of her other friends.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
We had this great dinner and nobody is talking about it.
And then finally, at like midnight, I mean, the restaurant's
still open. We've had a couple bottles of wine. Hugh
said something, and I just started bawling. And then Hugh said, Okay,
(10:13):
there it is. There we go.
Speaker 2 (10:16):
All of the emotions, the sadness, hurt, anger, confusion hit it.
Once the floodgates were finally open. She was still crying
at three am.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
When Patrick called me again, and he was crying. He
had gotten on a train and he had come to
New York City and he was calling me from Trisha's apartment.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Hannah had just found out that her husband had been
having an affair with her best friend in a twenty
four hour period. She confronted both of them, asked for
a divorce, and launched a novel. It had been one
of the longest days of Hannah's life. And then at
three am, the phone rang it was her husband Patrick.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He was with Trish and they'd been drinking, and I
could not believe that he was calling me from her apartment.
He wanted to talk to me about how dramatic I'd
been and how we would talk about this.
Speaker 2 (11:36):
He told Hannah that their marriage could survive this. All
the while Trish, the woman he said he loved just
hours before, was in the next room. It was clear
to Hannah that no matter what promises Patrick made, he.
Speaker 1 (11:50):
Was going to continue seeing her.
Speaker 2 (11:56):
Hannah told Patrick to give her space, so Patrick's stay
to New York to figure things out, and he stayed
with Trish. Meanwhile, Hannah had to keep going. She needed
to keep promoting her book. The next morning, she left
for DC for another book reading, but now she was
having trouble holding it all together.
Speaker 1 (12:18):
On the train ride down, I couldn't stop crying. I
was so disgusting. I had to get clothes out of
my luggage. So I pull out this shirt and I'm
wiping my face with it, and I feel like I
look like I'm contagious. And the train is packed, and
there's this lovely man and he's got this gorgeous suit on,
like beautifully put together perfect specimen of New York City
(12:43):
sitting next to me, and I am trying so hard
to make myself small, and I just keep leaning closer
and closer to the window because I am so disgusting.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
The whole ride down, Patrick continued to text and call
her she was falling apart. Those around her couldn't help.
Speaker 1 (13:02):
But notice in Philly, this man stands up, who I
have just assumed I am like a leoper to this guy.
And he gets his bag and I think, finally I
can spread out and be gross and not worry about
touching anyone. And he puts his hand on my shoulder
and I really thought he was gonna yell at me
or say like, do you know how disgusting you are?
(13:24):
And I looked up at him and he said, I said,
whatever it is, it's gonna be okay. And if it's not,
there are probably people who love you.
Speaker 4 (13:36):
And I just like lost it all over again because
he was so nice, he was so generous, and when
he said that, I just thought, I love people. People
are just the most amazing things in the world. He
was such a gift.
Speaker 2 (13:54):
It was a moment of kindness when she needed it
the most. After DC Hannah finally went back home to Kentucky,
and as promised, she saw a divorce attorney right away.
Patrick was in denial.
Speaker 1 (14:11):
He kept insisting that the marriage wasn't over, and I
just kept moving forward as much as I could.
Speaker 2 (14:19):
But eventually Patrick had to come back to Kentucky because he.
Speaker 1 (14:24):
Still had a job at the same school where I
was working.
Speaker 2 (14:29):
It was difficult to fully disentangle their lives. For ten years,
they'd built their worlds around each other.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Until we weren't. We'd always been sort of connected at
the hip. You know, all of our colleagues would say,
you guys do everything together. You're always together.
Speaker 2 (14:43):
Even though she was putting one foot in front of
the other, she was taking the divorce really hard.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Patrick had been her person.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
She missed him, and she didn't have the luxury of
space from him. She still ran into him on campus.
So a few months after the divorce was finalized, they
started grabbing coffee.
Speaker 1 (15:03):
We were able to maintain some amount of a friendship
for a little while.
Speaker 2 (15:10):
It felt a little like those early days when the
two of them were just friends, playing scrabble and coffee shops.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
They would talk about how.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Things were going in their careers. As months went by,
they even began talking about their new relationships. Hannah started
dating another professor at their university, and Patrick remained with Trish.
One time, he invited Hannah to grab drinks with him
and Trish.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
And of course I was thinking, this is great. I'm
just going to show them that I do not care.
So I got drinks with them, and when it was over,
they went to another bar and I offered them a ride,
dropped them off, and I went home.
Speaker 2 (15:52):
Looking back, she's still confused as to why she said yes,
because practically no time had passed between their divorce and
their friend and soon boundaries began to blur. Patrick started
making a lot of requests of Hannah. Once, in the
middle of the night, he called her on a drive.
He was on his way to see Trish.
Speaker 1 (16:12):
He was crying and I asked him if he was
safe to drive and if he needed to pull over,
and he said, I just need you to promise me
that we're always going to be friends, because if it's
we can't be friends, if I stay with her, I'll
break up with her. I need you in my life.
And I said, don't break up with her. We'll always
be friends. And I knew that I was lying. I
(16:36):
told him what I thought he needed to hear in
order to be safe.
Speaker 2 (16:40):
It was an unhealthy friendship, but it did have one rule.
Hannah made Patrick promise that if things ever got serious
with him and Trish, he would tell her.
Speaker 1 (16:50):
I never wanted to hear about something secondhand, and he
said that he would never let that happen.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
He promised. Then the following Christmas.
Speaker 1 (17:03):
My sister pulled me aside and said, I have to
tell you something, Trisian. Patrick got married, and I wanted
to be the one to tell you, because it was
pretty clear that he wasn't going to tell you. When
classes resumed that spring, he sent me an email and said, coffee,
(17:28):
you know, like we had been doing. And I said sure,
And I assumed that at this coffee he would tell
me that they'd gotten married. And I met him for
coffee and we talked for an hour and he was
wearing the ring, but he never said a word. He
never told me. I left thinking, whatever we just did, whatever,
(17:53):
Like weird anti flirtation that we're doing with him wearing
a ring and us laughing in a coffee shop while
he's not telling me. The most hurtful thing. I just
didn't need it.
Speaker 2 (18:07):
It felt manipulative, cowardly, and it was hurting her. She
was finally ready to cut him off. Throughout their whole separation,
Hannah seemed to be doing really well.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
Everyone would say, Oh, you're so much lighter now, you're
letting yourself have fun again. Everyone said that I was
just so much better, and I told them they were right,
that I was just so happy and it was such
a relief.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
She would smile and agree, but in reality, that couldn't
be further from the truth.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
This was when my eating disorder came back. I'd been
with Patrick for ten years, and I'd forgotten how to
eat by myself, how to do a meal alone, So
it was really easy to you go into starvation mode.
Speaker 2 (19:03):
Hannah's writing also took a hit. She was under contract
to write a fourth novel. It was the first time
in her career where she couldn't meet her deadlines.
Speaker 1 (19:12):
When I was writing this fourth book, I was very
aware of Hannah sitting at desk in front of computer,
making character move from point A to point B in
order to get to the next plot. Ce that made
me feel terrible.
Speaker 2 (19:33):
Her doctor was the first person to notice that Hannah
wasn't doing as well as she said.
Speaker 1 (19:38):
She said, are you getting any sleep? And I was like, yeah,
when I take you know, trazy doone and clonipin and
a couple glasses of wine. And she said, that's not sleeping,
that's passing out.
Speaker 2 (19:49):
She recommended that hannah' see a therapist, and Hannah knew
she was right. So for the next year, Hannah threw
herself into therapy and had some major breakthroughs. She'd been
so isolated as a child that she never learned how
to build healthy relationships.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
And I'm like, well, what do I do if I
don't like this girl that I'm friends with? My therapist
was like, so you don't like the girl, don't see her?
And I'm like, well, what do I do if I'm
dating a guy and I just want to break up
with him and I don't have a reason. She's like,
you break up with him? And I was like, oh,
I think because of my parents' divorce and because of
(20:28):
the trauma of that custody battle, I'd missed out on
just some certain everyday basics.
Speaker 2 (20:36):
It had been three years since the divorce and she
was still with that professor at her university. This relationship
also helped her heal. He had a young daughter and
together they formed a little family.
Speaker 1 (20:48):
And in twenty nineteen and November we bought a house together,
having never lived together before, so we did it all
at once. His daughter moves in, he moves in, I
move in, and then like three months later, COVID hit.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
During COVID, Hannah had more time than ever to focus
on her writing and to reflect on her divorce. But
she wasn't writing her usual fiction.
Speaker 3 (21:12):
New ideas just.
Speaker 2 (21:13):
Weren't coming to her. Instead, she kept revisiting real conversations.
Speaker 1 (21:18):
The conversations between Trish and Patrick and George and me,
and the conversations with my family and grad school. There
was something about that isolation and being sequestered in this
house that brought it all back. It was during that
time where I thought, Okay, I'm not over it, because
(21:42):
I'm still thinking about it. Let's just get it out
of me.
Speaker 2 (21:47):
So she started writing it all down, every conversation she
couldn't get out of her head, memories of Trish from
early days of their friendship, things she'd wish she'd said
to Patrick, or that Patrick had said to her, scenes
from the life they'd built and knocked down together.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
And then it accidentally became something that I thought could
be shared with the world, and then that turned into
my memoir.
Speaker 2 (22:13):
She named the book We Are Too Many a memoir
kind of She wanted it to be an honest attempt
at capturing a marriage gone wrong. If she was going
to write about her divorce and all the real people involved,
she wanted to get it right.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
I was such a part of it that fictional words
did not exist for what I had gone through, and
I just thought the stakes are so low in fiction.
But then when I made it us, I.
Speaker 2 (22:43):
Cared, even in sections that were entirely made up, like
imagined conversations between Patrick and Trish. She tried to paint
these people as they really were.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
He can be dismissive, he can be condescending, but when
he is charming, and when he shines that charm on you,
it's quite lovely. I wanted to capture that complicated character.
Speaker 2 (23:10):
There's no hero in the story.
Speaker 3 (23:12):
Every character shares Blaine herself included.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
In early drafts. I almost always got what I wanted
to say correct, and I almost always gave myself the
upper hand and the punchline and I realized I had
to go through and get rid of all the bullshit.
(23:39):
I think I did a pretty good job being honest
about how demanding I can be. I was unpleasant, especially
towards the end when I was mad.
Speaker 2 (23:48):
She also made it clear that she was only writing
from her perspective. These were, as she writes in her introduction,
imperfectly recollected exchanges. She was only telling her version of
the truth.
Speaker 1 (24:02):
I was never attempting to pretend that I had a
recorder with me. The whole time. I was just trying
to get out of my head these things that I
kept coming back to.
Speaker 2 (24:16):
But three years after beginning her memoir, and just as
Hannah was about to announce her book to the world,
she got an email from her agent.
Speaker 1 (24:24):
And the subject was have you seen this? And I
opened it, and I read it, and I read it again,
and I wasn't able to really make sense of what
I was reading, because what I was reading was a
synopsis of my husband's affair, our divorce, and our life
(24:46):
together as it imploded. And it was an announcement for
my ex husband's debut novel.
Speaker 2 (25:10):
Hannah was about to announce her fifth book, a memoir
about her divorce. Throughout their marriage, Hannah's husband Patrick had
struggled to get published himself. He'd often relied on Hannah professionally,
and now his first book is about the affair.
Speaker 1 (25:28):
I had a million feelings all at once. I was
so happy for him. I was also so mad at him.
This is how you're going to get published. Finally it's
going to be about us.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
At first glance, Hannah thought her ex husband had written
a memoir to a truthful account of what he'd done
to blow up their marriage. Confused, she sent a screenshot
to a friend and she was.
Speaker 1 (25:52):
Like, oh, sweetie, it's a novel. And I said, no, no, no,
but this all happened. Everything in the description happened. And
she said, and he's written a novel about your marriage.
Speaker 2 (26:06):
In her book, Hannah was confronting her role in her
marriage and its breakdown. She wrote Patrick as a real person,
someone with flaws and strengths. Her memoir was nonfiction. Still,
at the end of her book, people would know that
this was only her version of events, but he was
writing fiction. He was taking their real story and passing
(26:29):
it off as made up. Fiction writers often use material
from their real life as inspiration Hannah certainly did, but
this felt different. She worried how would he paint what happened,
how would he paint her? She wanted to gather as
much information as she could ahead of his novel's release.
Speaker 1 (26:50):
So for the first time in six years, I googled him.
I was looking for news of his novel. I wanted
to know anything I could. I couldn't find it but
a link to one short story that he'd written and
published in twenty nineteen, and I sat at the kitchen
table across from my boyfriend as I read this short story.
Speaker 2 (27:12):
The narrator of the story seemed a lot like Hannah's
ex husband, and the story was about him having an
affair with his wife's best friend. He gets divorced an
Remarri's sound familiar.
Speaker 1 (27:26):
And in the story there's very clearly a me character.
Speaker 2 (27:32):
There were scenes from their real life, down to the
details of his trip to New York and the phone
call confrontation about their affair. There were also details that
mirrored Hannah's career, the guy Hannah was dating, and even
weird details like how she's slept with a can of
pepper spray under her mattress, which the real Hannah did
(27:52):
during her marriage to Patrick. In the story, the narrator
is in the hospital with his new wife. Their ten
month old baby.
Speaker 3 (27:59):
Is extremely ill.
Speaker 2 (28:00):
While he's at the hospital, he's thinking about his ex
wife who's just died.
Speaker 1 (28:07):
The me character gets knife to death by a homeless person.
Speaker 3 (28:11):
The scene is pretty violent.
Speaker 1 (28:14):
She pulls over and she tries to help this homeless
guy who's on a bridge. She had had a couple
of glasses of wine, and he kills her, knife's her
to death. And that's sort of how those story ends.
That he's in the hospital thinking about his dead ex
wife and about to go be reunited with his new
(28:36):
wife and their new baby, and how he never got
the chance to tell the me of the story that
they had a baby in the first place.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
Hannah was at a loss for words. She was sitting
at her kitchen table reading about her imagined death.
Speaker 1 (28:55):
It is a pretty surreal experience to read about yourself
in third person, something that has been written by a
former lover, in which you're murdered. I was both amused, terrified, outraged,
(29:16):
and flu mixed that this story had been in the
world for three years without me knowing.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
As she always did in big moments.
Speaker 3 (29:23):
She called her sister.
Speaker 1 (29:26):
I said, my ex husband murdered me And she said what,
And I said three years ago, and I've been walking
around with no idea that I'm even dead.
Speaker 2 (29:38):
Hannah could have allowed this revelation to take her to
a dark place. It definitely concerned a lot of people
in her life.
Speaker 1 (29:46):
I have a couple close female friends who were really worried,
and my family thought it was pretty creepy.
Speaker 2 (29:54):
But if this was what he wrote in a short story,
what was he going to say in his forthcoming novel?
Speaker 3 (30:00):
It gave her anxiety.
Speaker 1 (30:02):
Knowing that there's a book in the world there is
going to be a version of me. It is going
to be a portrayal that I cannot like, And just
knowing that there was nothing I could do made me
feel slightly out of control and a little bit crazy.
Speaker 2 (30:22):
Who was she in this book of his? Hannah had
taken great care to try to write him truthfully. How
would he write her?
Speaker 1 (30:31):
I had a lot of serious conversations with my partner
now about whether or not I should read it, whether
or not he should read it.
Speaker 2 (30:40):
Patrick's novel came out two years after the announcement and
a year after her memoir was released, she asked a
few trusted friends to give it a read.
Speaker 1 (30:49):
They said, it's unflattering, it's ungenerous, you're smug, you're insecure,
and some amount of fun is being made of your body.
That I was being portrayed with such a caricature, I thought, Yeah,
that doesn't sound like something I need to read.
Speaker 2 (31:07):
Hannah did read the preview on Amazon.
Speaker 1 (31:09):
Though, and it was more than enough.
Speaker 2 (31:12):
In the first few pages, she recognized the character that
was supposed to be her, but it wasn't her at all.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
Like she said, it was a caricature.
Speaker 1 (31:22):
She's obsessed with her careers. She's obsessed with sales. She
writes books while walking her dog and talking to her
sister and watching TV. She's like hopping around the kitchen
talking to NPR while in her sweatsuit and making like
a smoothie or something. She's ridiculous.
Speaker 2 (31:44):
To this day, Patrick consists that his book is entirely fictional.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
He is to the world saying, this is fiction, this
is a novel. It has nothing to do with my life.
But he has given very very real, very factual scenarios
to the book.
Speaker 2 (32:05):
And at the same time, there's a clear connection between
their two books. When someone searches for Patrick or his
books on Amazon, Hannah's book is one of the top results.
Hannah doesn't know for sure, but she wonders if that
was an intentional move by his team.
Speaker 1 (32:22):
Because there's a story there, right, and stories sell books.
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Instead of staying angry, Hannah decided to do what she
does best, right, and so she flipped the script.
Speaker 1 (32:39):
I just thought, wouldn't it be funny if I wrote
a book about my ex husband writing a book about me.
Speaker 2 (32:49):
When Patrick wrote his novel, he reduced Hannah to a
two dimensional character, a cartoon. It was infuriating and humiliating,
and she decided to use those emotions to write.
Speaker 1 (33:02):
And I wrote a little scene in which there's this
woman sitting across the table from her boyfriend and she
reads this story in which she's been murdered by her ex.
And I started laughing after I wrote it, and my
boyfriend says, what are you laughing at? And I read
it to him and he said, that's funny. And then
I just kept writing these things.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
Pretty soon the book took on a life of its own.
Speaker 1 (33:28):
The book became something so much bigger and different than
just being like a revenge book, it became a book
about what it's like to be a middle aged woman
navigating this world.
Speaker 2 (33:41):
The book falls somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction, in
a genre called auto fiction. Hannah actually got the idea
to pursue auto fiction from her ex husband.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
I did not know what auto fiction was until I
read my ex husband's debut announcement in which the ex
wife is working on auto fiction, and at that point
in my career, I did not know this expression. It
was driving me crazy, and I started looking into auto fiction,
and I thought it was wonderful.
Speaker 2 (34:12):
Auto Fiction is rooted in real people and real events,
but it gives writers the freedom to play with reality
for the sake of a compelling story.
Speaker 1 (34:21):
It's so great. I basically just get to imagine myself
doing all the crazy things that I do in my
head but never out in the world.
Speaker 2 (34:31):
Unlike Patrick, she was explicit with her readers about drawing
on true events. For example, in her new book, a
woman named Hannah is living with her boyfriend and his daughter,
just as she does in real life.
Speaker 1 (34:45):
And she gets the news that her ex husband is
publishing a book in which a very unflattering portrayal of
herself is prominently featured being out of control and having
been turned into a character without permission. It's something that
she's suddenly focused on and questioning. We watch her as
(35:08):
she tries to figure out what's fair and what's not
fair and what do you do with shared memories.
Speaker 2 (35:17):
Hannah thinks a lot about these ethical questions around shared memories.
Speaker 1 (35:23):
If you've got two artists or two writers who share
these memories, of course they're going to be distorted. Even
when you have two people who love each other and
are still together and they're in a room, they're experiencing
something different. And so I love the complication of what
you do with the shared custody of memories.
Speaker 2 (35:46):
Today, Hannah's doing much better. She's in recovery from her
eating disorder. It's still something she carries with her.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I think I'm so proud of being on the other
side of it that I will never let myself get
back there.
Speaker 2 (36:02):
In many ways, she now feels grateful for what she
went through.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
It took so long to be honest with what I
wanted because I was so determined to please other people
and to attempt to fit into a particular type of
package to be palatable to be forgiving enough, to be sweet,
(36:27):
to not cause problems getting a divorce, and re examining
my life and making a conscious decision to figure out
what I do and don't want out of my life,
articulating my desires. That entire process was magical.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
The end all of our episodes with the same question,
why do you want to tell your story?
Speaker 1 (37:02):
We tell stories to make connections. I teach kids who
are eighteen to twenty six every day how to tell stories,
and one of the things that I'm always telling them
is we tell stories to make connections. And my divorce
was a major disconnection for me, and it was a
(37:23):
disconnection from the two people I thought I cared most
about in my life. And the story that I'm telling
I don't think is unique. In fact, I think maybe
that's one of the reasons that I want to tell it.
I don't think it's something to be ashamed of. I
don't think that being the person who's been cheated on
means you should hide in a corner. And by telling it,
(37:48):
I have the opportunity to make a connection, and I
also have an opportunity to inspire somebody else to want
to tell their own version of the same story.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
On the next episode of Betrayal. It's not like he's
a catch me if you can type person. He actually
lies to make himself as normal as possible, just like
your average bloke. If you would like to reach out
(38:26):
to the Betrayal team, email us at Betrayalpod at gmail
dot com. That's Betrayal Pod at gmail dot com, and
be sure to follow us on Instagram at Betrayal Pod.
Speaker 3 (38:38):
We're grateful for your support.
Speaker 2 (38:40):
One way to show support is by subscribing to our
show on Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to rate and
review Betrayal.
Speaker 3 (38:46):
Five star reviews go.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
A long way. A big thank you to all of
our listeners. Betrayal is a production of Glass Podcasts, a
division of Glass Entertainment Group and partnership.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
With iHeart Podcasts.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
The show is executive produced by Nana Glass and Jennifer Fasin,
hosted and produced by me Andrea Gunning. This episode was
written and produced by Kitlyn Golden and Monique le Board,
with additional production by Ben Fetterman. Associate producers are Kristin
Mercury and Caitlyn Golden. Our iHeart team is Ali Perry
and Jessica Kriinchech. Audio editing and mixing by mattel Vecchio,
(39:22):
additional editing support from Tanner Robbins. Betrayal's theme composed by
Oliver Bains. Music library provided by Mob Music and For
more podcasts from iHeart, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you get your podcasts from
Host
Andrea Gunning
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