Earlier this year, Ewell published a novel, Set for Life. Its narrator is unnamed, but his initial circumstances closely mirror what Ewell’s once were: a frustrated writer married to a more successful novelist, the two of them teaching in the English department of a liberal-arts college, his job offered as a “spousal hire” to help lure her. In the novel’s first chapter, the narrator, on his way home from a writing fellowship in France, stops over to see his and his wife’s good friends, a couple living in Brooklyn. (In the book, they are named Sophie and John and his wife is named Debra.) Near the end of chapter one, the unnamed narrator sleeps with Sophie.
[...] Ewell is far from the first writer to pivot on the intimate details of their personal life. But one circumstance in which he finds himself is somewhat less commonplace. In May 2021, he sent the manuscript of Set for Life to an agent. That November, he learned some disconcerting information.
In his novel, the narrator — who in this fictional world initially returns to live with his wife, his affair still secret — eventually realizes that his wife has known about the affair for some time and has been writing a book that will chronicle the disintegration of their marriage. Now, in the real world, Ewell discovered that a version of his story was actually happening. His ex-wife had written a book about their falling apart, and it would be published nine months before his.
[...] One further peculiar aspect of all this is that Ewell had already touched on these events in fiction several years before his novel, in a 2019 story called “Halloween” that was published in Juxtaprose magazine, but appears strangely unaware that he did so. “I don’t think of that story as being very rooted in experience or anything,” he says when I mention it, seemingly mystified that I might bring it up in this context.
I point out he is clearly using his marriage in it. He seems perplexed. “There’s an ex-wife with a boyfriend or something?” he asks. To which, well, yes, but rather more than that: The narrator’s ex-wife has stayed in the college town where they’d both once worked and married a man named Bruce, the former chair of the department, who has a daughter from a previous marriage. She is made full professor in three years. All of this mirrors Pittard’s subsequent life (aside from the fact she and her partner, Jeff Clymer, are not formally married).
[...] “Weird!” Ewell says. “I don’t remember that at all. But, yeah, I mean I guess I’m calling on my experiences and memories more than I thought.”
[...] All of which takes on greater significance for a very particular reason: This is a story in which the narrator’s ex-wife, Angela, is stabbed to death by a homeless man on the university campus. In other words, if we accept that Angela is based on Pittard, Ewell has written a story in which he imagines and depicts her murder.
I ask whether he didn’t consider what Pittard would think if she read this.
“It didn’t occur to me at all,” he says.
Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It: A tale of literature and treachery.
