The Sunday Stories
Fake Reality vs. Reality
Life comes at you hard sometimes. This is one of those times. I started filming a reality show—you know the one—and the hit F/X series Love Story just keeps marching on. It’s a lot.
I’ve wanted to correct the mistakes, the untruths. Mostly, I didn’t. Except for two: my late husband’s terminal diagnosis, and the fact that Carolyn’s mother is still alive and well, despite widespread reports that she died in 2007. She is a private person. Shame on everyone. I could’ve spend all my time setting the record straight—but for what? No one cared or noticed; they wrote what they wanted to write. It was frustrating so I started writing my truths, my stories, and the details that mattered to me.
Writing never really came naturally. Exposing emotions, exposing vulnerabilities—it didn’t then, and honestly it doesn’t now. I hide behind words. Writing that first letter to Graydon Carter in 2003, and three years later my memoir, something healed in me. Something painful, dark, jagged -- like shards of glass buried in my chest. For a long time, I carried the anger that they had left me behind to pick up the pieces — alone.
My memoir hit The New York Times Bestseller List back in 2005 and stayed there for twenty-one weeks. This week it’s back—but its return is bittersweet, obviously pulled along in the wake of the Love Story frenzy.
I wrote first to make sense of what happen, then to keep it from slipping away. Writing is the opposite of living, yet I can’t do one without the other. I started my story on July 16, 1999, because there was no other place to begin. The crash that killed three people, John, Carolyn, Lauren -- and three weeks later the cancer that killed my husband, Anthony. I lost everything that summer, I wasn’t the only one. We all lost something. It was personal for me, and for their friends and family, but it was also bigger.
1999 was the end of an era. The end of a decade. A century.