My verdict: tools all around.

The column is pretty appalling. I'm not sure why the author's wife should be called a tool. Frankly, she seems pretty great because she did not leave his whiny, pathetic ass long ago.

I used to complain quite a bit that ML was really failing to show us anything "modern" about love, but today I've realized that I am learning something so much more interesting, which is that most people, especially those who submit columns to the NYT, are completely free of any taint of self-awareness.

Julie doesn't seem like a tool, at least not from the excerpts.

Julie should find a third party.

I really, really wish for the kids' sake (and maybe Julie's) that the names had been changed. It's one thing for someone to write a nine-days' wonder, and another to have it accessible in electronic archives until the end of time.

Google is your friend, my friend. Kevin Mims. His flash fiction:

I grew up next door to Professor Landisman, the famous linguist. My mother said he was a walking dictionary, his head filled with every known fact about the English language. He gave me candy if I'd read nursery rhymes into a tape recorder. "Cock Robin," "Ding Dong Bell, Pussy's in the Well"--I read them all.

Whenever mother asked why, he'd get all inscrutable and mumble about monographs he was writing, with obscure titles like "Aspirated Consonants and Holophrastic Utterances in Children's Literature."

Now, 30 years later, he's dead and his archives made public. Seems he had more than linguistics on his mind. He'd spent years splicing together pornographic audiotapes from my readings of innocent little rhymes like "Tom Tit the Piper's Son" and "Crippled Dick Upon a Stick." A grad student at the university made a video combining my porno readings with X-rated movie footage. Zillions have viewed it on YouTube, making me a laughingstock worldwide. "Linguistic Lolita" the tabloids call me, and mother worries that the cat and the fiddle weren't the only ones being diddled in those basement recording sessions.

Were he alive today, I'd track down the old perv and tell him: "Hey, Mr. Dictionary Head. Don't go getting all inscrutable with me. I know the truth about your self-indulgent studies of the aspirated consonants and holophrastic whatevers."

Except I'd splice out all but syllables 1, 4, 8, 10, 15, 26, 27, 28, 34, 35, and 43. That'd put a ring around his rosie.

Dude, you said "taint." I thought about excluding Julie, but man, she puts up with a lot. Uhm, wanna put a timeline on yer man's writing career? Maybe choose partners who aren't tools?

That's it, Labs: blame the victim.

Uhm, wanna put a timeline on yer man's writing career?

From Stephen King's National Book Award acceptance speech:

The only person who understands how much this award means to me is my wife, Tabitha. I was a writer when I met her in 1967 but my only venue was the campus newspaper where I published a rude weekly column. [...]

Tabby Spruce had no more money than I did but with sarcasm she was loaded. When we married in 1971, we already had one child. By the middle of 1972, we had a pair. I taught school and worked in a laundry during the summer. Tabby worked for Dunkin' Donuts. When she was working, I took care of the kids. When I was working, it was vice versa. And writing was always an undisputed part of that work. Tabby finished the first book of our marriage, a slim but wonderful book of poetry called Grimoire.

This is a very atypical audience, one passionately dedicated to books and to the word. Most of the world, however, sees writing as a fairly useless occupation. I've even heard it called mental masturbation, once or twice by people in my family. I never heard that from my wife. She'd read my stuff and felt certain I'd some day support us by writing full time, instead of standing in front of a blackboard and spouting on about Jack London and Ogden Nash. She never made a big deal of this. It was just a fact of our lives. [...]

When I gave up on Carrie, it was Tabby who rescued the first few pages of single spaced manuscript from the wastebasket, told me it was good, said I ought to go on. When I told her I didn't know how to go on, she helped me out with the girls' locker room stuff. There were no inspiring speeches. Tabby does sarcasm, Tabby doesn't do inspiration, never has. It was just "this is pretty good, you ought to keep it going." That was all I needed and she knew it.

There were some hard, dark years before Carrie. We had two kids and no money. We rotated the bills, paying on different ones each month. I kept our car, an old Buick, going with duct tape and baling wire. It was a time when my wife might have been expected to say, "Why don't you quit spending three hours a night in the laundry room, Steve, smoking cigarettes and drinking beer we can't afford? Why don't you get an actual job?"

Okay, this is the real stuff. If she'd asked, I almost certainly would have done it. And then am I standing up here tonight, making a speech, accepting the award, wearing a radar dish around my neck? Maybe. More likely not.[...]

One of the few times during the early years of our marriage I saw my wife cry really hard was when I told her that a paperback publisher, New American Library, had paid a ton of money for the book she'd rescued from the trash. I could quit teaching, she could quit pushing crullers at Dunkin' Donuts. She looked almost unbelieving for five seconds and then she put her hands over her face and she wept.

I probably posted that here before.

8: feminism requires taking women's agency seriously, Tim. Actually, I blame the unions.

Uhm, wanna put a timeline on yer man's writing career?

How exactly do you visualize this working, Labs? I suppose she could leave him, but short of that?

10: OK, but why are you taking her agency seriously?

"Tabitha Spruce"? That's too corny to put in a novel.

I have some sympathy with Frank, since I never got a chance to be a Kevin even though that was one of my few options in life. Not much sympathy with Kevin, since he had the chance I missed and blew it.

How exactly do you visualize this working, Labs? I suppose she could leave him, but short of that?

In the end, it all comes down to the threat of leaving, so I don't see how this situation differs from any other.

There are so many things about the story in 6 I don't understand. The speaker has become a "laughingstock" because he was used, as a little child, to make pornography? And tabloids give a shit?

It has in common with the ML column a paranoid sensibility that is not about real victimization, but terrible fear of sexual emasculation and lifelong infantilization, unhappily combined with an actual infantile sense of need and causality.

14: So young, so naive. As if leaving were the greatest threat available. As if it were somehow a worse threat than a promise to stay.

That's kind of my point. In a relationship between two adults, neither one has the ability to control what the other does -- they can end the relationship, but not compel obedience short of that. Holding one partner responsible for the other's toolishness is a little screwy, unless you think that the toolishness is so extreme that any decent person would have left.

Julie could just have said after ten years, "This isn't working, get a job and write in your free time." He would have dumped her, and she would have been better off (if Frank was available already, anyway). Sounds like Julie was doing the work for two men, though perhaps if she got good support from Frank (not the typical case) he's cool.

Anecdote alert: A friend of mine knew an charming, intense artist whose wives only gradually found out that they were expected to support him. He'd just remarried; his first two wives lasted 3 years or so apiece.

As if it were somehow a worse threat than a promise to stay.

Wow, SCMT, taking relationship lessons from Emerson these days?

The ultimate threat is gasoline. Bobbitting is the just the warning shot.

Hmm, I admit that I sorta half-liked the story in 6.

Sounds like Kevin has a boner for "art" and suffering for it, which has compelled many a woman to support some sorry sack of shit.

My ex's ex's dad is a terrible, terrible poet whose wife has worked her ass off for 50 years supporting him while he dicks around and writes books that five people read. He's convinced that he's just too real for commercial success or something. All his poems are about looking at blank pieces of paper waiting for inspiration, etc.

Yeah, that's the thing. You're taking a terrible chance thinking that you might be Stephen King, not only with your own life but with others. (Even SK had a day job, after all.) There has to be some awareness that things very well might not pan out. Who know, maybe they had this conversation and everything's groovy, but then again the dude is worried about his wife going back to Joe Teamster.

Eh, a family makes the internal deals it does. This guy sounds like a tool because he's writing a Modern Love column, and they all are, but a marriage in which the husband isn't the primary breadwinner isn't necessarily a seething morass of exploitation and pain. Maybe he's a good cook, and spent a lot of time with his stepkids.

LB, much as I'd love to pick a fight with you, I have to get back to work. I agree: it's not that she makes more than he does that's the problem. It's that there's this thing he could do, or could have done, to make things better for the wife, and it's starting to look as though his reason for doing it-- because he has to write-- isn't the sort of reason that can bear this much weight.

I gave up on the artist-being-supported-by-wife thing after about a year and a half, and during that time we both worked part time, though she worked more than I did. My giving up was not entirely voluntary, but I never did try that game again.

24 gets it right. The problem is not (necessarily) that he is a failure as a writer and a breadwinner. Maybe they agreed that this how they would live their lives. The problem is he is writing a whiny column about how he is a failure and how he worries that his wife is going to leave him (rather than, maybe being really grateful to her).

Yeah, I'd be more okay with it if it sounded like she could make enough on her own to keep the family afloat, but he sounds like very expensive dead weight, and their life together is nothing but instability. And instability in your 20's is kind of cute. They're in their 50's or 60's, though, right? That is not a good time to be going repeatedly bankrupt while your partner tries to "make it" as a writer.

It's not a seething morass of exploitation and pain because the man is not the primary breadwinner. It sure sounds like a seething morass, however, from this line:

"I've been able to do this because Julie has put aside her passions -- horses, gardening, photography -- and gone to her job as an escrow officer each weekday to earn a living."

It's not that she's working to support him; it's that he is indulging his passions at the expense of hers. At some point, you'd hope he's think, "Hey, it doesn't look like I'm going to be Stephen King anytime soon. I'd better find some way to pursue my writing that allows Julie to ride horses, garden, and take some pictures."

And I do agree that this specific guy is a tool -- just that the structure of the situation doesn't make him necessarily enough of a tool that she's culpable for putting up with it. Also, Tabitha King? Showed good judgment, as well as commendable esthetic openmindedness. Man, if a writer ever looked like exactly the sort of person found lurking in the depths of one of his novels, King's it.

I've always had a soft spot in my heart for Stephen King, especially when he writes about his writing.

30: The difference here, also, is that Steven and Tabitha seem to have taken turns, to some degree, allowing each other to write. Throughout his entire career, SK has used every one of his successes to talk about what a great writer his wife is. When you're in a situation in which only one partner gets to be the one with a time-consuming and non-lucrative passion, you're edging toward an abusive situation.

32: Rg. Steven s/b Stephen

And on some level, he's really good at what he does. The thousand-page unedited novels are pretty horrendous, but the man writes a good tight short story, and I've thought that if he were fifty years older, and wrote in a time where short stories were a more popular/conventional mode, he might have been thought more as literature and less as pop trash.

Scary weird looking guy, though. Not that that's his fault.

32: Exactly. Which is where Julie seems far more victim than tool.

You know, Frank doesn't sound like such a tool either. He sounds like a guy who had children way too young (16!), indulged a bit of escapism when he was 24, then buckled down, worked hard for 30 years, and made a stable life for himself.

Well, if he's being fairly represented as still seething over a thirty-year-old divorce, that alone makes him a tool.

not just seething-- seething at barbeques. Hey, Kevin, mind if I f*&# your wife? Oh, just a little joke. This is like that "best in show" subplot.

Even in Kevin's representation of him -- and somehow, I distrust that... -- he doesn't seem to be "seething," but perhaps merely to have regrets. He wouldn't be the first person to regret a life-changing decision made when he was 24.

But maybe I'm romanticizing him a bit, given how thoroughly I detest the Kevin character in this story...

Is ironic self-awareness so advanced that this person feels he can't call Frank on that shit?

Given that he sees him mostly at family events for Jane and Frank's kids, I could see feeling awfully circumscribed about making a fuss about anything said in a formally good-humored manner. He's still an incredible tool, but not, I think, for taking Frank's crap rather than not making a scene at events that aren't all about him.

Fair, though it wouldn't have to be then and there.

Always assuming he's reporting accurately, etc. etc.

Is there any writing more loathsome than failed writers' writing about their failures? Frank may be a prick, but I still wanted him to punch Kevin in the face.

Frank as tool: each time he is said to have implied that Kevin stole Julie from him is tool time. He's no helpless victim of Kevin's.

Julie might be more fairly seen as victim, though not helpless, but that's already been said.

I remember listening to a talk given by Toni Morrison once in which she was asked about how to structure a life to support writing. Her answer was, "Keep your day job."

Stephen King at least kept his day job until he could afford not to. Kevin is the biggest tool (user, etc.), then Frank. In that respect, "tools all around" applies at least to them, IMHO.

Eh, I read the "I have to pay him back for stealing Granny Julie," in response to "Why do you kick Grampa Kevin's ass at badminton?" as something of a good-natured compliment to Julie in lieu of saying something like, "Grampa Kevin just really sucks at badminton," or "I really just despise Grampa Kevin for being such a parasitic drain on Granny Julie."

Of course, telling everyone that he's just waiting for Kevin to die so he can remarry Julie is decidedly toolish. Point taken.

Frank is a tool, Kevin is a tool, Julie marries tools, and the kid's name is Ashleigh. What dreadful people.

I'm confident that when the whole story is known, Ashleigh will be found to be the cause of all the trouble.

Is Ashleigh the grown daughter or the little granddaughter? (That's not really important to my theory, I just thought I'd ask. We aren't supposed to actually read these ML things, are we?)

Steal my column! Please! I left my power cord in NYC so I'm working on very limited internet time this weekend.

Ashleigh is the granddaughter who astutely reads Frank's badminton game as a puerile display of hostility. She may be the only blameless player in this drama, and will likely take up pot smoking and wearing her hair in dreadlocks to compensate for her precious name and the miserable memories of family get-togethers.

Devil children often get a free ride if they're cute little girls. Let's not be too easy on little Ashleigh. How many other sly things has the wide-eyed young thing done to keep the pot boiling?

For some reason, Kevin reminds me of a cheap, Dan Brown version of the narrator of Pale Fire.

There are ways to let people try out their art/etc. without getting to the "I'm sick of this" and threatening to leave situation. One of my friends just moved back to Connecticut -- he'd given himself seven years to make it as an actor in NYC. He came, busted his butt for seven years, and, well, it didn't pan out. He could have easily dragged that out for another two, five, ten years and I respect him for realizing it's time to move on.

Devil children often get a free ride if they're cute little girls

You may be right. One of my daughters called me into the bathroom a little while ago to wipe her butt, and made me miss Kevin Youkilis' home run. The timing was too perfect for that to be mere coincidence.

Kevin certainly doesn't do himself any favours with this column. But I have to say, the "flash fiction" in 6 is actually pretty good.

Now I'm trying to make this story work as a veiled story about Kevin Youkilis' attempts to make it as a big league baseball player.

50 may be on to something. Who was it that told Kevin that Frank is just waiting for him to die, anyway, hmmm? Did Frank really say that, or is this all part of some elaborate, get the parents back together, Parent Trap fantasy? Perhaps one in which young Ashleigh is not the devil child after all, but merely the pawn put up to it by Andrea or Mary Ann. It's all very suspicious, if you ask me.

Ashleigh may not want her grandparents back together. She may simply want to wreak havoc for its own sake. That's my reading of devil children, anyway.

Is there a photo? You can tell them right off.

There's a photo of Kevin at the link in #6. He's pretty good looking, in a creative writing instructor sort of way. Supposedly the whole key to the "flash fiction" is in the final two sentences, although I didn't have patience to figure out the syllables.

Why is Julie a victim? Just for choosing to support her husband? If Julie were the man and Kevin the woman, I doubt anyone would be saying that. Double standard.

With that said, the NYT piece was indisputably whiny and dick-ish. If Kevin were real writer material, he would have explored the fictional possibilities of his own whiny-ness and paranoia. This would actually make a great setup for a Steven King story. The totally non self aware narrator would allow his sense of injustice to lead him into all sorts of bloody, horror-movie type situations. While feeling the victim the whole time.

Kevin sounds like a giant douche who knows he's fucked up, but is going to put some blame on Frank anyways. Seriously, Frank has "sly ways of revealing" his wealth by buying...cd's and DVD's. Um, ok.

Frank sounds like he despises Kevin, and so he gives him shit. Big deal.

Double standard my ass. She's not supporting her husband, she's enabling him. As he robs her of her passion so he can pursue his own. I'd be saying the same damn thing if the genders were reversed. When one partner gives everything for the other, and 27 years later the recipient of that benevolence facilely excuses the continued refusal to contribute to the couple's support, it's bad no matter which gender is which.

Of course, who knows if this is how Julie really feels. Maybe she really is pursuing her passions and this idea that she's given up all of her dreams for Kevin's writing might all be Kevin's silly little narcissistic fantasy.

If Julie were the man and Kevin the woman, I doubt anyone would be saying that. Double standard.

It's one thing if him pursuing writing was doable because she was making enough for them to reasonably live on, but come on.

"bankruptcy, foreclosure, brief homelessness, the repossession of two vehicles, nearly 20 changes of address"

For this to be going on when one of the spouses isn't working is ridiculous.

That's true, gswift, I didn't remember that section. My point is that there's nothing inherently wrong wrong with one spouse supporting another financially, but it tends to get judged differently based on sex. It's the many evidences of dickishness in the article that turn you against him.

I still think that the obsessiveness and twisted self-protectiveness expressed in the article are the stuff of a fine fictional character, if he had enough self-awareness to understand it. Not that even writing a fine piece of fiction will necessarily get you any money.

You people are harsh. The man's taken jobs--temporary, low-level shit, but he's worked. He has a career, as a writer, and it pays shit, and he works mostly from home and does most of the domestic crap. She has a career as an escrow officer, which pays okay, but not great. They're a sorta lower-middle class couple, and a lot of the bankruptcy/foreclosure/brief homelessness stuff is pretty easily explainable by their living in California in the last twenty years.

Are they the choices I would have made? I hope not. But given that they have, and are still married, honestly, the only reason I can see to object to the situation is (1) prejudice against non-best-selling writers; (2) prejudice against adults who don't "earn their own living." God knows I share both, but do we really want to just assume that these prejudices are a-okay?

But given that they have, and are still married, honestly, the only reason I can see to object to the situation is

I object to his douchebag whining. It wasn't my dream to drop out of college at age 20 and spend the last ten years working night jobs at souless corporations. But hey, that's life. The mortgage, health insurance, and providing for teh kiddies comes before letting dreams take wing. Probably damn near all of us on this site have made a few sacrifices in this fashion along the way, because that's what adults do.

And "still married" doesn't mean he's not an exploitative whiny bitch. It just means either she doesn't care, or hasn't done anything about it.

He's *writing* about a common feeling, and one that isn't the kind of thing we like to admit or talk about because doing so is "douchebag whining." It's called being a human being.

Yeah, a whiny douchebag of a human being.

I will always be grateful to my wife for sitting at home and messing around with creative writing projects all day, to allow me to indulge my lifelong passion for stockbroking.

And all the time she's flirting with louche grad students like AWB, eh?

It's a perfect world; my wife thinks I'm with my mistress, my mistress thinks I'm with my wife, and I'm happily sitting at work reading 10-Q filings.

63: I don't think it's a prejudice against non-bestselling writers. If he were working some job, waiting tables or greeting Wal-Mart shoppers while struggling to make it big, I don't think anyone would think him a tool for dreaming the dream.

The part about adults who don't earn their own living comes a little closer to the mark. But it's not so much about that as about adults who shamelessly afford themselves the luxury of their passions at soemone else's expense. Yeah, he worked some temporary, shit jobs over the years. But he quit them all as soon as the financial crisis of the moment had passed. And he could afford to do so because his wife gave up her passions to bear the burden of carrying him

At its heart, this is the same sort of thing as the guy who makes his wife give up her career because he needs an at-home domestic to help him climb the ladder. That she has stayed doesn't mean she's okay with it or happy. The way he describes it -- that she can't pursue her passions, that she can't afford to retire -- certainly doesn't sound like she's fulfilled. He may be right that the best he could do at this point is low-level work. But, geez, it's better than nothing. With a job at Starbucks, maybe he could afford to buy her Sinatra cds, too.

I can see how easy it would have been for me to wind up in Julie's shoes. I relate, perhaps project. It ain't always easy to recognize when you're being exploited, and it ain't always easy to get yourself out when you do.

If he were working some job-- as you point out, he *does* do that when the need arises. The thing about "she can't pursue her passions"--I find it somewhat difficult to swallow whole. It sounds to me like it's half a false dichotomy between "real work" and "passions" (which I think is the article's biggest flaw, and also one that most of you seem to be accepting at face value), and half hyperbole, designed to magnify the "problem" the piece is supposedly about.

Yes, there are relationships where one partner's a slacker who coasts on the other, just as there are relationships where one partner's an ambitious money-grubber whose dedication to their job puts the other one in the position of doing all the unpaid work. From the description of *this* relationship, it sounds like the author's a slacker, up to a point. But there are clues in the article itself, including the narrator's apparently self-serving nature *as narrator*, that suggest that that reading is a pretty major oversimplification--a reading the author's projecting onto both Frank and the reader.

It may indeed be a false dichotomy between "real work" and passions here. Unless Julie shoots out a follow-up piece, we won't ever really know if she's passionate about her job or even about simply being the provider in a more general respect. But since Kevin describes it as her giving up her passions to work a dreary job supporting him, his attitude continues to annoy me. If he truly believes that his "slacking" has relegated her to an empty and trying existence, then his continued slacking is obnoxious even if he's wrong about, or overestimating, how she feels.

Dichotomy. Heh.

Keywords in that piece:

". I have spent thousands of dollars attending writing conferences and hiring professional editors to help me perfect my manuscripts. "

In other words, he's not only too good for a regular job while waiting for his writing to take off, he's wasting quite a lot of money on things that he should know will not making him a better writer or get him published more.

His writing is nothing but a hobby his wife, in his own words, has given up her own passions for and that's what makes him the biggest tool here.

I totally agree with 74. Literary agents will help you with a lot of this stuff, if they think that they can sell your book. Letting her support him is one thing, though I think that he should have tried to keep a part-time job, but spending all that money on coaching is too much.

Martin Wisse (#74) is right. Attending a couple of writing conferences is fine. Hiring a professional editor to help you organize your once-in-a-lifetime nonfiction book about widget fabrication is fine. Spending thousands and thousands of dollars repeatedly attending conferences and hiring freelance editors in the hope of being transformed into a selling professional writer is the mark of a no-hoper.

None of which has anything to do with (#63) "prejudice against non-bestselling writers." Lots of writers make perfectly comfortable livings without ever "bestselling." This guy's problem isn't that he isn't John Grisham; it's that he isn't getting anywhere, and he's valorizing his failure instead of sensibly going on to try something else.

I think what people are forgetting here is that kevin mims lays out the fact that he's been a less-than huband, that his indulgences have taken away from his wife's happiness, that frank's childish attempts at stealing his wife away are also lame but might be working. I mean the guy exposes his inadequacies and failures to you, and how it made his relationship have this sinking hole in it, and you guys poke fun at how he's a tool. He's the one to tell you that in the first place. I thought the piece was a very honest look at the consequences of choices in a relationship and about the equity of work and its emotional effects. Isn't the point of a relationship to support one another in your efforts towards happiness? This guy's talking about how perhaps the way he went about it didn't work - I commend him for it.

I think what people are forgetting here is that kevin mims lays out the fact that he's been a less-than huband, that his indulgences have taken away from his wife's happiness, that frank's childish attempts at stealing his wife away are also lame but might be working. I mean the guy exposes his inadequacies and failures to you, and how it made his relationship have this sinking hole in it, and you guys poke fun at how he's a tool. He's the one to tell you that in the first place. I thought the piece was a very honest look at the consequences of choices in a relationship and about the equity of work and its emotional effects. Isn't the point of a relationship to support one another in your efforts towards happiness? This guy's talking about how perhaps the way he went about it didn't work - I commend him for it.