On Halloween 2004, Modern Love debuted with an essay by Steve Friedman: “Just Friends? Let Me Read Between the Lines.” It was edited not by me, but by my wife, Cathi Hanauer, a novelist and former magazine editor.
Trip Gabriel, the Styles editor at the time, had hired us as contractors to edit a new personal essay column about relationships. Trip had been moved by our his-and-hers essay anthologies, “The Bitch in the House” and “The Bastard on the Couch,” which explored the stresses and joys of marriage, work and parenthood in the early aughts.
Cathi and I split the work of commissioning five essays to get us through our first five weeks of publication, and then she decided not to continue, leaving it to me. When I asked Trip how long he thought the column would last (i.e.: How long will I have a job?), he guessed “a year or two,” because, as he said, “these things have a shelf life.”
Twenty years and more than a thousand essays later, Trip and I sat down to talk about the column’s origins.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Daniel Jones: What made you want to start this column?
Trip Gabriel: In 2004, I was about seven years into my editorship of Sunday Styles. Part of what we covered was relationships — wedding announcements and so-called “trend” stories. But I was always a big admirer of voice-driven personal essays.
The Times had a couple of columns that were inspirations for Modern Love. In the 1970s, we had “Hers” that ran in what was then the Home section, inspired by the feminism of the 1970s. The mission was to showcase writing by women about women’s topics. They were personal essays, and they were good.
And in the ’80s, The New York Times Magazine created “About Men,” essays by men about personal topics — mostly men trying to figure out their relationships to their fathers! Both columns had ended, and I wanted to start a similar column about relationships — not just from male or female perspectives, but from both, about both.
I had read Cathi’s book and then yours and decided to assign Ginia Bellafante, one of our best writers, to go up to Northampton, Mass., and do a profile of you two. And it turned out wonderfully.
And the article inspired me to see if you would be interested in jointly editing this column I had been wanting to create. I thought we would do it the conventional way, which was to solicit essays from well-known writers. I don’t think anybody here had high expectations for the column, except for me.
DJ: You asked us to create a package of five essays to start with, but Cathi backed out before the first column even appeared because she was working on a novel and wanted to focus on that. But I remember you being a little worried about handing it over to me. You hid it well, but —
TG: Cathi had a higher profile because her book was a best seller.
DJ: And she’d been a magazine editor for years, and I hadn’t. She was much more experienced.
TG: So, yeah, when it turned out it wasn’t going to be Cathi Hanauer, but Dan Jones, I gulped and thought, “All right, we’ll take a chance.” But at that point, it was unclear what kind of legs this would have; how successful it would be. And I remember you coming to me and saying, “We should just open it up to contributors.”
DJ: I said, “Let’s just put an email address — [email protected] — and see what comes in.” I had been a struggling writer for a decade in my 20s, had lived all around the country, participated in writing communities, and I knew there was all this great work out there, and that if we opened it up to everybody, we’d find fresher stories. It wouldn’t be only New York or coastal.
And I remember you saying, “We can do that, but I don’t think you’re going to get much usable material that way.” I was unsure too. But after a few months, essays started pouring in. And I never had to solicit a writer again in 20 years.
TG: People figured it out.
DJ: They did. And some of them weren’t writers at all, or didn’t consider themselves to be writers. But they’d read someone else’s story and think, “I have a story too.”
TG: I do know that calling it “Modern Love” was your idea.
DJ: Yours was “Truly, Madly, Deeply.”
TG: [Laughs] I’d probably just seen that movie.
DJ: And then we also considered calling it “Postmodern Love,” which would have been a little too cute. That was my suggestion, because I thought “Modern Love,” inspired by the David Bowie song, was almost too obvious.
TG: No, but it was simple, and it’s a brand at this point, an institution. This kind of storytelling is as old as human beings, and there’s going to be no end to it.
DJ: And there’s no getting used to it for me either. Just this morning I was editing a piece, which for me is about problem-solving, and I don’t often feel emotional about the stories. There can be a numbing effect from being exposed to this kind of human conflict and suffering for so long. But in this piece, which is about a man and woman who are friends and become lovers for the first time when he’s dying of thyroid cancer, they realize too late that they have this connection that goes beyond friendship. And I was crying a little as I was editing it, thinking, “Man, after 20 years, I can still feel that moved!”
TG: It’s a testament to the fact that there’s going to be a lot of ways to connect to readers for a long time.
DJ: Thank you, Trip. You started at all.
TG: In this marathon, I ran the first five steps, then handed it off to you. And you’ve been chugging along ever since.
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