Don't worry, your writing career wasn't that promising.

Look, even if this guy had never laid a hand on you but gave you shit every night about having screwed four guys before him, you ought to have gotten out. To him you'll always be a whore, a slut, whatever other endearing names he manages to come up with. Novelist? You think he'll let you write, let alone publish, a novel with that ego of his held together with scotch tape and spit? You're already seven-tenths removed from the marriage, getting back in will just move you inexorably closer to a place where, next time, it'll be even harder to get out -- kids, shared property, all the impedimenta of a (miserable) joint life. Get this straight: marriages ought to be happy or they just ought not to be. Work? Sure. Rough patches? Everybody goes through them. Isolated incidents of emotional and/or physical abuse? Even that, *maybe*, provided that the abuser takes immediate steps, with professional help, to ensure that the abuse is not repeated. But this guy is pathological AND acting in bad faith (Nanny issues? There's got to be another therapist around there someplace); it sounds as if fear, dread, and guilt are an everyday experience for you. Stay away.

Someone needs to explain to me how it is that creative people's creativity is hindered by having children. Or how anyone's ambition is hindered by the presence of children. Ambitious and creative people are by nature people who go out of their way to achieve what they want. It's hard work without kids. It's hard work with kids. It's hard work. And if it's difficult coaxing your butt out of bed at 2AM to retrieve a screaming child at thirty, imagine how it feels at forty.

And, Cary, one doesn't "postpone" a pregnancy by terminating it.

No need to deal with the humaniacs. Just sign on to Craig's List in any major metropolitan area and there are dozens of cats, dogs, kittens, and puppies waiting to be adopted from private homes. I love animals, but sorry -- I would never subject myself to the scrutiny of some self-appointed Rescuer, to whom I would be providing data concerning my income, family life, credit status, etc. for the purpose of being evaluated by an entirely subjective process anyway.

I'm a novelist and so I have had far more than my share of encounters with people whose attitude toward the vocation I've devoted my adult life to is "I can do that too!" So while I sympathize with McClelland, I wonder whether it's Oprah and the rest of the five-hour runners who are ruining things or if it's the fault of a sport not organized enough or quick enough on its feet (so to speak) to adapt itself to accommodate this boom in popularity. The novelist-wannabes have creative writing workshops, and tiny little magazines in whose pages they can flatter themselves that they're being published, and, of course, the internet (sorry, bloggers!), and so the real writers can go about their business undisturbed. Why not a similar division for "serious" runners?

But, gee, I also have to say, McClelland's description of pushing himself past pain and into the puke zone, no doubt doing further damage to his already ground-down joints, sounds precisely like the sort of pathological behavior that passes for being "game" (sorry, jocks!). In light of McClelland's implicit desire for a distance-runner's paradise populated by masochists collapsing, vomiting, and going into convulsions, I think the Oprahs are kind of, well, healthier.

I couldn't wade through the 170 letters preceding this that shower the LW with scorn and say such remarkably insightful things as, "gee, if your husband is threatening to leave you maybe the marriage overall isn't so hot" to find out if anybody else has pointed this out, but to all the geniuses (including Cary) who think a maid service will solve the problem:

They don't clean up clutter. They clean clear and unobstructed surfaces. If you have a pile of clothes on the living room floor they will vacuum and mop around it. Not their job -- why should it be? They're there to clean, not figure out the taxonomic arrangement of your household. Who knows, maybe you _like_ having dirty dishes on your coffee table. Of course, you can hire a real maid, and advise her precisely as to her duties, but that would take about as much time as taking the dirty dishes off the coffee table and loading them into the dishwasher. Honestly, most of the people I know who have housecleaners come in spend most of their time getting their houses clean enough for the cleaner to clean properly. Ironic, huh?

I can't believe nobody's mentioned the London setting. What's up with Woody Allen and London? I mean, I'm well aware by now that Allen can make an absolutely shitty movie set right on his beloved Upper East Side or back in his beloved Forties, but when he steps off the island of Manhattan he totally loses his bearings. Everything either has a Berlitz accent -- i.e., is incapable of operating idiomatically -- or degenerates into caricature just a little more refined than the deliberately broad strokes with which he painted LA in Annie Hall. London? It's like Faulkner setting a novel in Detroit.

As a sixty-five-year-old gay man, I never cease to be amazed at the way that kids have swiftly acted to reclaim the ostracism and feelings of persecution that traditionally have been attendant upon identifying oneself as homosexual. "This was the 1980s." Please. Would you like to try Grand Rapids, Michigan in 1957? Or, like my partner of twenty-eight years, Newton, Massachusetts in the early '60s. Give us all a break. So high school was difficult for you, dear? It is for everyone. It wasn't because you're a lesbian.