Making Peace with the Past

by Gwen Cooper — April 23, 2007

Today I return to my hometown of Miami Beach to begin the first leg of my book tour. I had written in an earlier blog that I had a recurring nightmare in which various ex-boyfriends showed up at my reading to pepper me with embarrassing questions and generally make mischief. And it seems, as events unfold, that it wasn't an entirely unfounded fear.

I've heard--either directly or indirectly--from a handful of exes as word of the book spreads in Miami. One or two have taken the opportunity to see their own names in the hometown newspaper by making unkind or overly revelatory remarks about me and/or our sex life together. (To re-purpose a "Fat Albert" joke: How are some of my ex-boyfriends like school on a Sunday? No class!)

Others, however, have surprised me. I've received emails and phone calls over the past couple of days from a handful of them, offering congratulations, support, and general good wishes. A few have actually read the book and are wondering if they are correct in seeing some of themselves in my heroine's love interests. Could be...I reply.

I read something by a writer once who said that writing about people you know is an inherently hostile act. Maybe that's so. But I've found recently that it can also offer an opportunity to reconstruct formerly burned bridges, or to offer long-overdue "I'm sorry's" for the various ways in which we all tend to be insensitive to the people we care about when we're younger and less wise. Writing the book allowed me to make peace with certain aspects of my own past in many ways. That is has also offered me the opportunity to make peace with specific individuals is, I suppose, the icing on the cake.

The best part, though, is when the past bleeds into the present. Robert, my recent best friend-cum-boyfriend-cum-possible-happily-ever-after is taking a couple of days off from work to accompany me to Miami. So I don't have to go into the lion's den unescorted, he says. Let's see: How is Robert like school on a Monday...?

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, out this month from Simon & Schuster. To read all of Gwen Cooper's posts in The Dating Life, click here.