The XX Factor: What women really think.

Thy Neighbor's Wife, and Thine Own

Thy Neighbor's Wife, a narrative of the sexual revolution and one of my favorite books, has recently been reissued with a new forward by Katie Roiphe. I read it long after the controversy that nearly sunk Gay Talese's writing career, and his marriage to publisher Nan Talese. In a fabulous profile in New York Magazine this week, he talks about that period and a new book he's working on, about his actual marriage. The controversy began when he let a reporter from New York follow him around on his reporting trips, which included jaunts to massage parlors and orgies. The literati iced him for supposedly betraying his very popular wife.

It was presented in a way that really trivialized what I was trying to do, says Talese. It didn't take it with any seriousness; it was a mocking piece. It really put me down as a silly person. It was very diminishing.

In retrospect, Talese seems to have triumphed. Thy Neighbor's Wife  is fueled by an intense curiosity about his subjects' intimate lives, the kind that only comes when the author has a personal stake in the matter. Plus Nan swears in the latest profile that she didn't mind, and he called her every day from wherever he was.

Now, thirty years later, Talese is making the exact same mistake all over again. Here he is, with a reporter from the same magazine, drinking with Nan and their girls and talking too much about a book he hasn't even written yet.

Unlike his first love, his Zelda Fitzgerald, Nan was his compromise match, he says:

When I met Nan, I thought, this is a person that I'm not going to be dumped by. And that mattered to me. In a practical sense, I wanted to succeed, and I wanted to have someone who cared about me personally, and Nan did.

Nan obliges in turn.

I thought that it was my responsibility to take care of everything that involved marriage. He paid the Con Ed and the rent bill and anything he would have had to pay anyway. I would pay for the groceries, the nanny, and everything to do with the children. I never wanted to be a burden on him. I knew he always wanted to be free.

I'll read anything Talese writes. But somehow this is making me uncomfortable. I excuse his earlier "betrayals" in the service of telling the great American story no one else would tell. Also, his transgressions were so extravagant, and theatrical. But for a confessional memoir? And such small betrayals which feel more intimate than the flashy ones. In this case, it feels self indulgent, and I resist letting him have the last word