Well I started to write just say what a funny, well-written piece this was, but I happened to read the previous mail first. What are you people on about? I can't imagine what it was in this story that touched such a nerve...or why you don't seem to get that it's gotta be pretty good writing to have you so up in arms...

I don't think the writer is missing that it was a messed up relationship. Clearly, in the interim between then and now, she's learned a thing or two about healthy vs. unhealthy interactions. ("Spouses commit themselves to a lifetime of Al-Anon for lesser dependencies than this.")

But I mean, really... von Bulows, first editions, and a Pucci scarf. Can you blame her for getting caught up in the madness?

Tessa, the piece is funny, with just the right hint of pathos. Fuck em if they can't take a joke.

Wanna see how Tessa describes herself? "Filmmaker Tessa Blake was born in Houston in 1969, and reared between Texas, Colorado, and Europe. The combined elements of her parents' divorce and her extensive education exposed Tessa to a remarkable variety of cultures and lifestyles from an early age. Experience from the provincial to the cosmopolitan taught Tessa to become something of a social chameleon, and she is as comfortable in Houston's fashionable River Oaks as in New York's funky Greenwich Village. It is this unique sensibility that makes Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me such a candid look at the secret world of Houston's upper crust.

Tessa's childhood afforded her enormous exposure to new and different experiences. She attended kindergarten and primary schools throughout the US and Europe. Sent to boarding school in Scotland at the age of eight, Tessa spent two years enrolled at the Gordonstoun School in Aberlour-on-Spey. She returned to the States at ten, and attended Aspen Country Day School for the next four years. High school yielded a return to boarding school, this time at Connecticut's Choate Rosemary Hall. Accepted as a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Tessa majored in English and Classics. She was graduated with honors, and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1991.

Having acted in and directed both theater and television productions in Chapel Hill, Tessa went on to graduate study in New York. At Parson's School of Design, she had her first taste of filmmaking, directing the comic short, Stone's Throw. Later, at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, she met legendary theater director Richard Schechner and agreed to join his fledgling East Coast Artists as Executive Director in 1993."

Salon editors, please stop publishing these icky, self-absorbent diatriabes from trustifarians. I wanna read more about people who do real, meaningful things such as the woman who used to detail her experience as a court-appointed child advocate.

I went and found that same bio "Whiner" quotes. It's from the website for a movie the author of the story directed. I'm pretty sure the director didn't "describe herself" that way. More likely, some studio or some publicist described her that way.

I think Sergei's right... some people just hate people because they have money. That is so tired. It's like you missed the whole point of the piece.

Does anyone wonder why there is a legal drug out there that is regularly causing people who mix it with a single drink to not remember whole portions of their lives? If you ask me, I think that's pretty scary. This is the first time I've ever heard that about Ambien, which previously I thought to be a fairly innocuous drug. Shows you just how much we know, without a press release.

Drug cocktail interactions are really getting to be complicated to parse these days. Seems to me it'd probably be a lot safer to just get your vitamins by eating dark leafy greens and let the darwin awards and mother nature sort out the rest!

Interesting story, though - thanks, Salon, for informing us yet again about the weirdnesses of our contemporary age through entertaining (and occasionally fluffy) writing!

Scarier than what happened to me during the VERY brief time I took this stuff. I don't recall any amnesiac effects, but I had horrible, horrible dreams on it. I mean Hieronymus Bosch horrible, full of images that I haven't forgotten yet (and this was fifteen years ago). If Boyfriend needs a sleeping pill, he might consider talking to his doc about Lunesta, which seems very clean and free of hangover or affective fallout to this insomniac - the only effect it has on me is way-better-than-usual sleep. Lunesta is expensive, but Boyfriend seems to be a cost-is-no-object type of guy. Of course, I'm only speaking from my own experience, and hazarding no guesses about how it might affect his amatory prowess.

I think this was a really interesting story. I have no abusive or judgmental remarks to make about the writer or the guy she's writing about.

But now I'm wondering what prompted Eminem to go into rehab for Ambien. What embarassing or weird or scary thing did he do when he was sleepwalking? Oh well, maybe it's better not to go there...

I think Ambien is a scary drug. It's also (yet) another easy source of irony for anyone in the medical marijuana movement, because the most frequently listed side effect reported by medical marijuana users is "improved quality and quantity of sleep."

Endocannabinoids seem to be involved in regulating the delta phase of sleep. Rodents given endocannabinoid blockers suffer impaired deep sleep.

Ambien gets approved by the FDA, but the American taxpayers are stuck with the bill for the Bush administration's expensive political and law enforcement campaigns against medical marijuana.

Yech, there's too much irony going around.

Actually, I took Ambien myself for more than a year, I had no problem with it, I did sleep well every night, but I never drank while I was taking it. I think it's very useful to have the information one is getting from this article, whether or not one gets annoyed by all the trappings and accoutrements of the priviledged that it reveals, because now we know more what's going on in situations like this. It's not you, it's not the drugs, it's not drinking, it the specific combination of all three. Also I think it is useful for her to depict a relationship that kept going on fumes simply by the repetitive experience of what felt like affection, this does happen to many but the innocent and naive believe it means something when it just means that small area of the relationship is meeting your needs, while the rest does not. That this dynamic can be part of the seductive process, and doesn't necessarily mean anything (I would add especially from people who come from this particular exalted level of privilege). It's like many situations in Henry James, the super rich no longer need to collect things, they collect people and personalities and experiences and know how to play such innocents like violins. Surprising though, that the writer didn't know this already, since she is no doubt familiar with Henry James and does appear herself to come from this type of milieu, or been brought up in close association with it as shown in the biography one of the letter writers revealed...