Interesting That He Titled His Last Book Severance
Posted by: Keir Graff
When I read the following news item — excuse me, gossip item — this morning, I nearly did a spit-take. Then I checked the calendar. Nope, not April 1.
Elizabeth Dewberry is leaving her husband, Robert Olen Butler, for Ted Turner.*
That’s weird enough. What’s weirder is that Butler made the announcement in an e-mail to his grad students and some colleagues.
Weirder still, he was surprised that someone leaked the e-mail.
Even weirder than that are the kinds of details he thought they needed to know. From the New York Post‘s Page Six (“Writer Dumps Hubby for Ted“):
“She has spoken openly in her work and in her public life of the fact that she was molested by her grandfather from an early age, a molestation that was known and tacitly condoned by her radically Evangelical Christian parents,” Butler wrote. “And it is very common for a woman to be drawn to men who remind them of their childhood abusers. Ted is such a man, though fortunately, he is far from being abusive.”
What does Dewberry think of her Butler’s revelations? Fortunately, we don’t have to ask her, because Butler tells us:
Butler, whose books include “Tabloid Dreams” and “Mr. Spaceman,” told Page Six he showed Dewberry his e-mail before sending it off and, “she was weepingly grateful to me for it. It’s full of love and compassion.”
Oh, the humility!
(*The mogul’s extensive real-estate holdings remind me of the Monty Python bit about arranged marriage:
“Don’t like her?! What’s wrong with her? She’s beautiful, she’s rich, she’s got huge…tracts of land.”)
