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Four Friends, Two Marriages, One Affair — and a Shelf of Books Dissecting It
When writers cheat on each other, everything is fair game for publication.
The scene is set by the first sentence of its back-cover précis: “In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish.” In her unhappy early 20s, she’d developed an unusual habit: She’d go to Bloomingdale’s in Chicago, gather up an array of expensive clothes she couldn’t afford, then lock herself in the well-lit safety of a dressing room, undress, and go to sleep for hours surrounded by the outfits she would almost never buy before waking and trying them on, playacting the personalities she imagined she one day might have. She also sends me a draft of Nights and Weekends beforehand, characterizing it to me in an email as “a work of autofiction” and telling me this: “It was about my time in New York, being married to Ryan, alcoholism, self-destruction, an addiction story that is harrowing and horrible and thank God it didn’t get published.” Her description is accurate enough; it’s gripping in its chaos, recklessness, and despair, and artfully so.
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