Night of the Living Exes

by Gwen Cooper — April 6, 2007

In a mere few weeks, I will be returning to my hometown of Miami for the sake of promoting my new book. I’ve been back home many times, of course, in order to visit family and friends. But because my book is one of only a handful of novels published about Miami, and has therefore already gained a fair amount of attention in that town, this particular homecoming feels as though it will be slightly more public than others have been.

I’ve already heard from any number of friends and acquaintances who’ve told me they plan to be front-and-center at readings and cocktail parties—which is, as a writer, exactly what you want to hear. But I also have this recurring nightmare in which all of my ex-boyfriends in Miami (and there are enough of them to make this a truly terrifying thought) show up en masse at a reading to pepper me with uncomfortable and highly personal questions in a highly public context. It’s not something I think will actually happen, and may simply be my mind’s metaphor for coping with general performance anxiety. But still…it’s one thing to run into an ex somewhere, and quite another to have all of them gathered in one place for the express purpose of seeking you out.

I know several people who have a tendency to remain friends with their exes after they’ve broken up, and I may as well admit that I am absolutely not one of those people. It’s not so much that I hang on to the residual hostility that follows in the wake of a failed relationship. It’s just always seemed to me that remaining friends with an ex means that, sooner or later, you’ll have to have additional talks about your relationship and your feelings: why the two of you couldn’t make it work as a couple; how it feels to hear about the dates the other one is going on; why and how you can make a long-term friendship work in light of your previous relationship. And talking about my feelings or having a conversation “about the relationship” ranks right up there on my personal-enjoyment scale alongside root-canal surgery without benefit of anesthesia. I think this is why I ended up being a writer—it’s much easier for me to write than to talk!

So I guess it’s only natural that the literal worst thing I could imagine would be having, say, nine or ten of those conversations with nine or ten different men in a single night. Which is why, I guess, I keep having this nightmare. If anybody has good ideas as to how to exorcise the demons of relationships past, I’m all ears. In the meantime, I think I’ll scour the Yellow Pages and see if I can find a young priest and an old priest…

Gwen Cooper is the author of Diary of a South Beach Party Girl, to be published this month by Simon & Schuster.