MR. WRONG, REAL-LIFE STORIES ABOUT THE MEN WE USED TO LOVE, edited by Harriet Brown; Ballentine Books; 259 pages; $24.95
"One woman's trash is another woman's treasure," Alicia Erian points out in an essay titled "Ardor and Its Discontents." Her work is one of 24 essays in a new collection titled "Mr. Wrong."
The editor, Harriet Brown, would have done well to quote Erian on the cover. Because, in truth, when you first pick up "Mr. Wrong," you find yourself thinking, "This isn't fair. For every man with something 'wrong' with him, there is a woman who has something 'wrong' with her, too."
Nor does Brown, the editor, ensnare you with her introduction. She should have begun with the sentence she wrote on the third page, "You can learn a lot about yourself from a truly soul-sucking relationship." Instead she begins by listing a series of gross habits and gross body parts belonging to her previous boyfriends.
Right away the reader is put off. But your outrage dims as you read along — one essay after another, some written by well-known authors. As you read, you find yourself sympathizing with some of the Mr. Wrongs and a lot of the Ms. Learned My Lessons.
Several authors have compassion for Mr. Wrong. Several realize their own part in the rottenness of the relationship. A few are too defensive, but most strike just the right tone.
And there is a pleasing variety in the tones. Ethel Morgan Smith's sentences are short and merciless as she describes cyberdating. Roxana Robinson writes achingly of her first date; she and the boy were both so awkward. Many authors are adept at describing denial.
At its core, "Mr. Wrong" is a soap opera of a book. The love-gone-sour essays are intriguing, but only if you don't mind the sordid details, including the sadness of sex with someone who is only using you. Or whom you are only using. Salaciousness aside, many of the authors now seem healed and happy, looking back on their early mistakes from the perspective of middle-age.
In her essay Erian writes, "This had been my life for the past three years, since my husband and I separated. I was trying to find someone to marry and have a baby with. It wasn't really working out. Not only that, but I was very bad at managing the pain of it not working out. As a dater, I was not light on my feet. I was heavy and lumbering, like an elephant. Or a caveman. I would meet someone and beat my chest, as if to say: ME WANT HUSBAND! ME WANT BABY! If I had met me, I would've found me hilarious. Most men weren't me, though."
Ann Hood's "Swoon" begins like this: "When I was a little girl, maybe four or five, I fell in love with a little boy with the unlikely name of James Stewart. He had already been kicked out of kindergarten, and that combined with his cowlick and freckles, his swagger when he played a cartoon for me on his Kenner Give-A-Show projector, his confidence as he handed me a raw potato and said in France they were called omelettes, all of it began my lifelong path toward the handsome guy, the troubled guy, the bad guy."
Jane Smiley describes her long-ago love in "A Good Struggle Relationship," saying, "I don't know what made him a Marxist, but he was the first one I had ever met. I viewed it as an interesting quirk in a medievalist, and I thought it was funny that he would write papers that showed how the reign of Pepin the Short, in the eighth century, demonstrated Marx's aphorism that power comes from the barrel of a gun. I was a little scandalized that he felt in his heart that the president of Yale deserved to be shot, but I knew instinctively that he was too normal to ever act on that feeling. Perhaps more taxing was his love of argumentation, and of taking every sort of contrarian point of view. Once I asked him why he thought he knew everything; he declared that he had thought every thought and chosen the best ones. And I believed him."
Marilyn Jaye Lewis writes of her husband who was gay and died of AIDS, saying, "Thanks for the memories, Liu. And here they are now, those memories, those reasons I loved you, why I hated you, why I don't regret the day you walked into my life."
In her essay, "That Thing He Didn't Do," Jacquelyn Mitchard describes how a bad long-distance romance can last for years. She writes, "To my regret, I unsheathed my not-inconsiderable claws. I told Patrick I never wanted to hear his criticism again. I never wanted to hear his ex-wife's name, either, and if he wanted to see her even for dinner, he need not call me, ever again. But a week later he did, contrite and ardent and comic, and I relented. We made and canceled plans to see each other. And I knew full well that this could go on for a lifetime, in fits and starts, and drive me mad."
"Setting My Hair on Fire," a piece by Raphael Kadushin, offers another sentence that would have worked well on the cover: Kadushin concludes, "People say there is a Mr. Wrong, but there isn't really. There is only someone who teaches you what you need to know when you need to know it."
E-mail: susan@desnews.com