Hooray for Lily Allen. I can’t get her messy, bracing new album, which crisply dissects her failed marriage, out of my head. I’m all for processing romantic wounds in private: consuming large tubs of ice cream, drawing the window shades, crying hot tears into the depths of a down pillow. Breakups can be agonizing, even immobilizing; sometimes, wallowing is the ideal way forward. Eventually, you get sick of yourself and move on, though this can take a while—sometimes a long while. That’s also okay. (I was single for 10 years after my divorce, which was maybe a little too long of a while.)
But there’s something to be said for processing heartbreak by spilling secrets or otherwise setting things ablaze. Allen’s West End Girl is a prime example of this tactic. In October, the British performer lit the internet on fire with a 14-track, 45-minute-long effort that tracks the dissolution of her marriage to the actor David Harbour (Stranger Things) after he supposedly violated the terms of their open marriage. (Harbour has not commented directly on Allen’s album, but in an interview published last month, he made vague reference to “the slipups and the mistakes” he’s made.)
Mistakes, perhaps, like the one Allen sings about on “Madeline,” a frenetic, sarcastic number addressed to the “other woman”: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant.” Later, on the much softer, sadder “Sleepwalking,” she laments that there’s “been no romance since we wed”—that “you let me think it was me in my head / And nothing to do with them girls in your bed.” Ouch.
Allen definitely has a way with words. But her album is hitting such a nerve, I think, not just because of its clever lyrics but also because it can be thought of as an extremely public breakup letter of sorts: sweet-revenge lemonade made from bitter lemons. Very bitter. (Paging Beyoncé.) West End Girl invites listeners to follow Allen’s relationship as it unravels, and the album sorts through all kinds of rubbish along the way. Allen’s reference to a Duane Reade bag full of sex toys is especially cheeky.
West End Girl is raw and over-the-top at times, but that’s part of the point. Breakups preceded by infidelity can be particularly gross and mean, as is the way we talk about them, to ourselves and to a salivating public. Allen’s approach is light-years away from, say, the concept of “conscious uncoupling,” which a self-satisfied Gwyneth Paltrow popularized a little over a decade ago. Sometimes, the only way past the hurt is not around the muck, but through it.
Aggrieved truth-telling as romantic warfare, especially among women, is a narrative tactic that goes back to at least the days of Shakespeare. In The Taming of the Shrew, written in the late 16th century, the “shrew” in question, Kate, tells her new husband, Petruchio, who has embarked on a project to “tame” her willfulness, “My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, or else my heart, concealing it, will break.” Kate is rebelling against Petruchio’s efforts to control her, but her words also help explain confessional outbursts from women who’ve spent too long in relationships suppressing anger.
I love this kind of dirty laundry. In 2002, I edited an anthology, a cultural history of women’s breakup letters, when my then-boyfriend disappeared on me after a pregnancy test I took came back positive. What I discovered in researching the book was that, often, women’s most powerful and wince-inducing responses are written not while a relationship is ending but after the fact, when things start falling into place—when realizations dawn and connections are drawn—and they get really and truly pissed off.
These “autopsy” letters, as I called them, are what they sound like: postmortems in which correspondents pore over and explicate the collapse of a relationship, bit by bit, point by point. They’re not diaristic entries, in which the writer is addressing herself; rather—as with Allen’s album, which uses the second-person singular in the present tense—they are typically directed at the individual she feels has wronged her. They can be both charming and ugly, semi-controlled demolitions that are fascinating to behold and deeply relatable to anyone who’s ever been mad as hell and unwilling to take it anymore.
Take Catherine Texier’s Breakup: The End of a Love Story, which is not a letter but a memoir. (I published an excerpt from it in my book.) In the late 1990s, Texier, who at that point had been married to her writer husband for nearly two decades and had two children with him, discovered that he was having an affair with his editor. How? She found the receipts. Literally. “I didn’t want to tell you about the receipts, about the page torn off your book,” Texier writes. “It seemed cheap to me, another cliché, the wife rummaging through her husband’s papers looking for evidence. I didn’t want to admit that I had played the part.” Later, she has a violent fantasy in which she smashes her husband’s head against a hard surface until it’s “pissing blood, teeth flying, your hair matted with the innards of your cortex.”
Texier’s and Allen’s autopsies unfold similarly. Both women struggle through stage after stage of emotion: shock, resentment, self-pity, anger, bargaining, self-loathing, more anger—and eventually, with luck, a little bit of acceptance, and personal responsibility too. Part of the art of airing dirty laundry lies in sullying oneself in the process. Without an admission of faults of one’s own, an outburst reads as sour grapes. In Breakup, for example, Texier doesn’t recuse herself for her part in her marriage’s dissolution or for the ugliness of her reaction to it. Neither does Allen: We see how desperate she is at times, how in denial and defensive she can be. She can also come across as pathetic, rash, immature. In one of the album’s later tracks, she admits: “I feel embarrassed, I feel ashamed / You’re so indifferent and that’s insane,” followed by “Why won’t you beg, won’t you beg for me?”
Unlike an artist such as Taylor Swift, whose breakup ballads can seem a little pat and distant, often positioning the narrator as a sort of heroine, Allen’s songs tend to make her seem, well, spiteful. Which is a good thing. As she puts it, her objective is to “lay my truth on the table.” (In fairness to Swift, the 2024 song “How Did It End,” from her album The Tortured Poets Department, is a self-described postmortem, though the target of the narrator’s ire isn’t her onetime beloved but “interlopers’ glances.”)
Listening to Allen’s lyrics, so full of dismay and bewilderment, I thought of a multidisciplinary artwork by the French photographer and writer Sophie Calle, which showed at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Inspired by a breakup letter from one of Calle’s lovers that told her to “take care of yourself”—this was also the title of the piece itself—Calle’s riposte was spirited, and a little sardonic. She asked 107 women to interpret her former lover’s letter in an effort to help her process it; those she enlisted included a psychiatrist, a singer, and a sharpshooter, who shot bullets through the letter from a distance.
A far less successful example of a public postmortem has preoccupied much of the media world in recent weeks: that of the journalist Ryan Lizza, who, through his Substack newsletter, began lobbing written grenades at his onetime fiancée, Olivia Nuzzi, just as she released a memoir that touches obliquely on her engagement-ending involvement with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whom she’d profiled as a writer for New York magazine. I don’t know about Lizza’s salacious allegations, but I do know that he does the dirty-laundry thing all wrong: His serialized revelations read as a calculated, self-serving endeavor; he doesn’t interrogate himself much. Burning it all down to settle a score only really works—engenders sympathy or understanding, for example—if you’re also dousing yourself with a little accelerant before lighting the match. (Nuzzi’s memoir, her version of a postmortem, has been interpreted as a failed attempt to turn scandal into literature. It doesn’t reveal much at all, except that she has a strange way with the English language.)
Allen’s album is much closer to Calle’s lucidly distilled autopsy—pain transmuted into rat-a-tat art—than to the written by-products of the Lizza-Nuzzi affair. West End Girl, in its captivating urgency, succeeds as art; perhaps time would have honed Allen’s insights, but I suspect that the album wouldn’t have packed the punch it did, both creatively and professionally, if she’d waited a few years to write and release it. (Allen, who recently performed songs from the album on Saturday Night Live, has confirmed reports that she is in talks to turn the album into a stage production.) And seeing a mess of real emotion—the self-doubt, the fury, the anguish—can feel like a relief these days amid the filtered idealism of our feeds: the perfect meal, the perfect vacation, the perfect marriage. There’s also something to be said for the satisfaction of holding someone, anyone, accountable at a time when accountability is in short shrift—even if it’s within the context of a lower-stakes, mildly out-of-the-ordinary story of infidelity.
As Esther Perel writes in her 2017 book, The State of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity, “The dagger of romantic betrayal is sharp at both ends. We can use it to slash ourselves, to pinpoint our shortcomings, to underscore our self-loathing. Or we can use it to hurt back, to have the slayer experience the same excruciating pain they inflicted on us. Some people turn the dagger inward; others direct the blade toward the culprits, in real life or in fantasy. We swing from depression to indignation, from lifelessness to roaring rage, from collapse to counterattack.” You gotta start somewhere.
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