The Sunday Stories

The Theft of Story...and its Inevitability

My inbox has been full lately. Notes from strangers, Bravo junkies, acquaintances, people I haven’t spoken to in years — all asking some version of the same question about Ryan Murphy’s Love Story. Have I seen it. Will I watch it. Is it accurate. Did it happen that way. They’re kind messages, almost apologetic, as if they know they’re stepping into something personal but can’t help themselves. John and Carolyn still do that to people. Twenty-six years passed, but they are still present everywhere, they were never allowed to move into the past.

Podcasters and writers and editors reached out, each hoping I could confirm or correct what they were about to believe. The asks are usually the same: what were they really like? what is the truth? how are they different from how they’ve been portrayed. As interest grew, so did the requests — as if my being so close to them, meant I could explain it forever. For a while, I believed I could.

At first, protecting them in death felt like the only hill that mattered — the one I’d die on. I didn’t realize how much of the unraveling I’d become part of — especially of Carolyn. I wish she had remained an enigma, but that was never going to be her fate.

First came the biographies, then the documentaries, and now the scripted TV shows—hyper-dramatic, moody lighting, and vaguely believable. It happened slowly at first, then at warp speed. I suppose it’s the predictable evolution of a story that keeps insisting on being told.

We create narratives for people because they’re simpler than the complexities of real life.

I wrote that in my memoir in 2005, perhaps the truest thing I’d ever written. I also wrote: what remains is our story — in the end, the only thing any of us really own. It inspired my title, yet it might be the most untrue sentence in the book.

Though I believed it then. But do we? In our age of social media and AI, nothing stays private; everything is repurposed, circulated out of context and beyond our control. Our stories are harvested, reframed, served up to a world that consumes everything, leaving little we can still claim as our own. Even in death. Especially in death.

I try not to dwell on the ubiquitous photos of Carolyn, though it’s nearly impossible to avoid them on Instagram. Every so often one flickers by—some I even recognize as mine, pictures I once published or carelessly gave away. There she is walking their dog, Friday, in those oval sunglasses now buried somewhere in my closet, flared Levi’s, a white button-down. Or in a black dress, MAC Ruby Stain on her lips, hair pulled back, glamorous and “effortlessly chic,” on her way to the White House. That’s what the world sees.

But I see her—the girl who pulled that dress on in the stark NIH bathroom, laughing as she tried to blot away the red stain from the Italian ices we’d just stolen from the nurses break room. We laugh together, but the beeping of my husband’s machines keeps us tethered to real life.

I get older, but the pictures never do.

It’s always the same handful—her downcast expression, as if she’s folding in on herself. To the outside world she became that girl: eyes lowered, timid, hunted. A pretty silhouette in a fabulous outfit. Even now it’s hard to reconcile the woman I knew with the one flattened in those frames.

The real woman was neither a slave to fashion nor timid. She was a protector—the one who could crack open a desperate moment with a perfectly timed quip, fierce enough to make you rethink everything, soft enough to take your hand and guide you through anyway. Practical in her clothing, sensible enough to pull her long hair off her face. That was the truth of her. The rest was the world getting it wrong.

I recently watched an old interview John did with Oprah when he was launching George. He was handsome, charming, self-effacing, witty—all the familiar adjectives that followed him his entire life. That’s what the audience sees: the charm, the wit, the polish.

But all I could see was his hair—his impossibly perfect hair—and the woolen ski cap he’d tug on after a shower to tame it. He’d wander around the apartment for hours like that, as though a damp wool hat were perfectly normal. I saw him in that hat so often that even watching the interview now, I half-expect to see the pompom at the edge of the frame. I find myself only half listening, wondering instead what became of that hat—where it ended up, who kept it, and why something so small, after so many years, can still linger the way it does.

Maybe that’s the point. So much has been taken from us that we cling to the small details—the things that made them real, human, ours.

The interview aired on September 3, 1996. Eighteen days later they’d be married in a secret ceremony. His friends and family already knew, of course. But sitting on that couch, Oprah did not. The world did not. And in that small gap between what was known and what wasn’t, it felt like a quiet victory. My handsome husband standing at the altar in the candlelit church, dancing with Carolyn under a plain white tent, happy his cancer was in remission, temporarily. I didn’t yet know how quickly everything would shift.

How quickly memory—once tender, private—would be absorbed into the machinery of consumption.

Sitting here now, we know how it ended. And yet the story keeps being told. Reinvented. Embroidered. Filled with details no one could possibly know, by people who weren’t there and don’t care about the truth. We think we own our stories. We don’t. Not in life, and certainly not in death. That is the quiet theft—slow at first, then at warp speed.

So the hill eventually became a mountain. But now I am at peace with it all. I no longer worry about misrepresentations, false narratives, or bent truths. I don’t flinch at flat, lifeless descriptions or cornball storylines. I don’t care whether people get it wrong, get it right, or ever know what they were really like.

My mother-in-law, Lee —who carried the burden of more than her share of gossip and mythology—always understood the game. She knew that to live an interesting, complex life, to take fully what it offers and benefit from all that it gives, carries a measure of misunderstanding.

But no, I won’t be watching. But you should—watch it, and fall in love with them the way we all did back then. Just… don’t DM me. ; )

If you like my Substack you’ll love my books:

What Remains, a memoir

Widows Guide to Sex & Dating, a novel