In March of 2022, the novelist Hannah Pittard got an email from her agent that made her stomach flip: “Did you see this?” the subject line said.
The message contained a screenshot from a publishing industry website, announcing that Pittard’s ex-husband, Andrew Ewell, had written a novel. The plot so closely mirrored their troubled past that at first Pittard thought it must be a memoir.
Pittard herself had already written a memoir about their marriage and divorce, which used imagined and reconstructed dialogue to recount how, in the summer of 2016, she learned that Ewell was cheating on her with her best friend, and how the double betrayal shattered her sense of self.
Ewell had taken some of the same events and turned them into “Set For Life,” a satirical novel narrated by an aspiring writer who resents his wife’s successful fiction writing career, struggles to produce his own work and has a love affair with her best friend. In a metafictional twist, when the unnamed narrator’s wife learns he’s cheating, she writes an autofictional book about their marriage and divorce; the narrator later writes an autofictional novel of his own.
Pittard sat stunned in her kitchen, reading the announcement over and over.
“I just kept seeing the overlaps from our life,” she said. “I was having these wildly competing emotions. I was so annoyed, so mad, but most of all, I was curious.”
She also found the situation bizarrely funny. “I did what I naturally do,” Pittard said. “I started writing about it.”
The result is “If You Love It, Let It Kill You,” a darkly comic, slightly unhinged work of, naturally, autofiction. The novel — Pittard’s fifth — is not strictly autobiographical (for one thing, there’s a talking cat), but much of it is blatantly lifted from her life. Early on, the narrator — a novelist who, like Pittard, lives in Lexington, Ky., and teaches writing — discovers that her ex-husband has written an unflattering version of her into his debut novel, and that his book details his affair with her best friend.
At one point, Pittard’s narrator questions the ethics of mining one’s marriage and divorce for material.
“He didn’t ask permission to write a novel about me,” Pittard writes. “For that matter,” she continues, “I didn’t ask his permission to write the story of our separation in my memoir. But the trespass feels different now that we are no longer together. This joint custody of our past has sneaked up on me, and I find I am unprepared.”
The poet Ada Limón, a friend of Pittard’s, said she wasn’t surprised that Pittard chose to write a novel in response to being fictionalized in her ex’s book.
“When something happens to her, even when it’s terrible, there’s some part of her brain that goes, I can make this a good story,” Limón said.
“As writers, we’re in charge of the narrative, and suddenly the narrative slipped out of her hands,” she added. “It was like, who gets custody over the story?”
Literary history is full of tumultuous marriages between writers — famous couples include Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick, Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But the question of who gets to tell the story, and how, can get complicated when formerly married writers draw on the same material.
The saga of Ewell and Pittard’s marriage and divorce has now spilled out into the pages of three books (plus, for those keeping score, a 2017 essay by Pittard, a short story by Ewell and an excruciatingly detailed article in New York magazine about how their relationship has bled into their writing).
“To me, it’s a cautionary tale about how writers should never get married,” said the novelist Adam Ross, the editor of The Sewanee Review, which published Pittard’s essay, “Scenes from a Marriage.”
“There’s just an infinite way to make a mess of things, and Hannah was not afraid to chronicle them,” Ross said. “She’s fearless.”
Pittard and Ewell, who are no longer in touch, now seem forever linked by their literary output. And while neither seems particularly pleased at being written about by the other, they tacitly acknowledge they are guilty of the same transgression.
Ewell pokes fun at this obliquely in “Set For Life,” when his narrator, after learning his soon-to-be-ex wife has written about his affair, fumes that “skewering your own spouse in a novel” amounts to “treason.” (The meta joke, of course, is that Ewell is doing exactly that with his caricature of Pittard.)
In an interview, Ewell said he hadn’t read Pittard’s forthcoming novel and had only skimmed the memoir, “We Are Too Many,” which he said included “plenty of stuff that wasn’t true to my recollection.” He had already submitted his manuscript to his agent before he learned of Pittard’s memoir, and envisioned his novel not as autofiction, but as a parody of the genre, he said.
“I was mostly interested in the subject of writing and satirizing some aspects of academia,” he said. “Of course, I had been married to another writer for a while and we had been on two different career trajectories — Hannah’s career had taken off and mine hadn’t really at the time — so that was a starting point.”
The timing of their books’ releases — “We Are Too Many” came out in 2023, “Set for Life” in 2024 — may have given readers the mistaken impression that he was responding to her book with his own.
“Unfortunately, Hannah’s memoir came out not too long before my book, and I think some people read it in that context,” he said.
For her part, Pittard was torn over whether or not to read Ewell’s novel. “I spent a lot of energy and time thinking about whether I should read it, more than I probably should have,” she said.
She finally read just a free preview on Amazon, enough to feel “grossed out” by what she felt was an unflattering portrait of her as a calculating commercial writer who’s obsessed with her career and her appearance.
“He also made me much more successful than I’ve ever been,” she said. “That one hurt a little bit.”
Pittard had just published her first short story when she and Ewell met in Charlottesville, Va., where Pittard was studying creative writing. They married in 2012 and eventually found teaching positions at the University of Kentucky.
In the summer of 2016, they spent months apart as he went on writers’ retreats. That July, a mutual friend in New York told Pittard that Ewell had cheated on her with the friend who had introduced them. Pittard confronted him and told him that their marriage was over.
For the next couple of years, they remained colleagues in the English department. Ewell married Pittard’s former friend, and later left the university and moved back to Charlottesville. Pittard and Ewell eventually stopped communicating, and neither informed the other that they were writing about their shared history.
When Pittard sat down to write after learning about Ewell’s book, she wasn’t planning a novel. Then other characters from her life started populating the narrative, including her family members and her boyfriend, Jeff Clymer. She found herself writing about her anxieties surrounding aging and death and feeling stagnant as a woman who’s getting older; pretty soon, she had the backbone of a novel.
A few people cautioned her against writing about her ex again, so soon after her memoir. One friend suggested it was time to move on. That only made Pittard more committed. “I thought, well, I’m only getting started, I’m not letting go,” she said.
The writer Maggie Smith said Pittard’s “fabulously strange” novel feels like a departure from her memoir in its scope and manic voice, even though it is nakedly autobiographical.
“It doesn’t at all feel to me like this is a continuation of that story,” said Smith, a friend of Pittard’s.
Now 46, Pittard said she’s done with the story of her marriage and divorce. Her next novel, a literary thriller set in an upscale community, tackles wealth, privilege and the housing market.
But even with “If You Love It, Let It Kill You,” she feels she’s moved past her and Ewell’s overlapping story, and made it fully her own.
“This is my life and my material,” she said. “I’m really no longer thinking or writing about him.”
Alexandra Alter writes about books, publishing and the literary world for The Times.
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