The Alchemy of Heartache
The concept of lingering trauma doesn’t exactly fit my worldview or my version of myself. I comprehend it but tend to, like my Irish/Welsh heritage demands, bury that dark shit in a compartmentalized vault. When some of it gets pried loose, I’m often caught off guard and not always in a good way.
My method has been when tragedy explodes, I write about it, put it away and figure that once written and put out into the world, I’m done with it. Yet, to quote Magnolia, you may be done with the past but the past ain’t done with you.
Immediately following the devastation that was my wife’s confession that she had been/continued to be a bought and paid for woman, I channeled my rage, hurt, and disillusionment into essays and short stories that became I Didn’t Marry a Prostitute. I published on Valentine’s Day a year later. It was cathartic. It was weird. It was taking my wounds and making something artistic from the wreckage.
This practice isn’t a new one. Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage (1973) basically autopsies his own relationships on screen. It’s so emotionally precise it reportedly caused spikes in divorce rates. Nora Ephron’s marriage to Carl Bernstein imploded, and she responded by writing something funny enough to make revenge feel civilized with 1983’s Heartburn. Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977) isn’t about isn’t about a simple breakup—it’s a group project in emotional collapse. Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham torch each other in harmony. Christine McVie writes Don’t Stop about leaving her own marriage. It’s basically a hit album powered by mutual emotional surveillance.
A few weekends past Lily Allen performed at the theater. The launch of her North American Tour of the concept album West End Girl. Her music has never been my jam (I prefer harder rock over jazzy pop) but the show shot a blade underneath the cracks in my armor.
And so. As I am want to do, I dove in headfirst. I listened to the album multiple times. I found myself doing that celebrity crush thang. I looked into the specifics of the album and the tawdry divorce from actor David Harbour. I further went down internet rabbit holes about her own chaotic life up to this moment. The woman is both a complete train wreck and exactly my type. As we are supposed to do, we forgive a multitude of horrible behaviors due to tough life situations but most of hers seem to stem from her own actions. For the past twenty years, she has been both vicious and vulnerable, cheated on multiple husbands, had five abortions, openly blamed her children for derailing her career, and absolutely embraced the celebrity of her excess. The woman has been, for much of her adult life, a tabloid’s wet dream.
You know, exactly my type.
None of that matters. Picasso was a notorious misogynist. David Bowie had sex with teenagers. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife in a drunken fight. Being a less than stellar human isn’t necessary to create extraordinary art but it doesn’t invalidate it either. Despite her torrid history, West End Girl is an amazing feat and her accolades are well deserved.
The album is a gripping play-by-play of the nuptial breakdown, a series of events that starts with the husband asking for an open marriage to the wife finding sex toy collateral and hearing from the other woman, “Madeline.” The theatrical interpretation onstage is an even more intimate and voyeuristic attempt at art imitating life, allowing viewers to sit with the pain alongside Allen.
The one-sided phone call at the end of the title track is gut-wrenching. When she performed it live, the audience yelled in outrage. The arc of the album is a straightforward story of someone in love with someone moving on. She wrestles in near strangulation in Ruminating:
And now I'm ruminating, ruminating, now I'm in my head
Ruminating, ruminating all the things you said
Why can't you wait for me to come home?
This conversation's too big for a phone call
Ruminating, ruminating, I'vе been up all night
Did you kiss her on the lips and look into her еyes?
Did you have fun? Now that it's done
Baby, won't you tell me that I'm still your number one?
'Cause you're my number one
Later after discovering what seems to be a rule break in the open relationship agreement, she writes an email to the other woman:
How long has it been going on? Is it just sex or is there emotion?
He told me it would stay in hotel rooms, never be out in the open
Why would I trust anything that comes out of his mouth?
Oh, why would I trust anything that comes out of his mouth?
We had an arrangement
Be discreet and don't be blatant
There had to be payment
It had to be with strangers
But you're not a stranger, Madeline
She comes back to Brooklyn and needs a place to crash and goes to his apartment getaway. Filled with sex toys, hundreds of condoms, Allen has to confront that while she is in recovery for addiction, it is her husband who is the real addict.
Onstage, for the number 4chan Stan, she unravels a cloth into a dress that is screen printed with Harbour’s receipts of hotel rooms and gifts he’s purchased for his many illicit trysts. It’s brutal. It’s brilliant.
This sort of dark confessional revenge oriented art is cathartic for anyone who has lived through something similar. It is, however, a narrative of victimhood. As I used to teach in storytelling technique if your story positions you as the hero or the villain, the victim or the underdog, rewrite the narrative. Allen is performing this all over the world and reliving it hundreds of times. I can’t imagine it’s good for her well being.
This hits home for me. I have these past few years leaned into the telling of stories of my battles with management and bureaucracy (painting the tale of my heroic fight against mediocrity) and my failed marriages (portrait of a victim of his own choices). The more I spin these yarns, the more I believe I am heroic or victimized and that isn’t a heathy outlook.
I appreciate Allen’s music and her utter audacity. West End Girl is a big deal. I hope her next album (of which I will definite dive into as I am now a fan) is more triumph than failure.
I hope my next book will be, too.
