myself having to defend it (‘It’s true! They do follow me!’) at a hastily convened crisis meeting.
Nothing was said, and the column appeared as written. I wondered if the ban on domestic subjects had even been passed on. I decided it didn’t matter, because now I had a full week to get my shit together.
The next column was a tightly wrought spoof apology taking in some recent scandals dogging the BBC, which had the twin advantages of being extremely topical and almost exactly the right length. Two weeks later, however, I suffered another failure of imagination, and at the last minute I wrote about my wife’s amusingly callous reaction when I got knocked off my bike by a taxi. I wondered if it was possible to get sacked less than a month in.
Already I was beginning to feel the pressure of a weekly column; on the following deadline day I found myself in South America on another assignment, jet-lagged and bereft of inspiration. After a lot of handwringing and hair-pulling, I concocted a parody of those book group discussion questions you find at the back of paperback novels, based entirely on the only reading material I had with me.
A week later, in response to a report suggesting that Neanderthals may have possessed the power of speech, I cobbled together a hilarious dialogue between a Neanderthal couple who were expecting the Homo sapiens next door for supper. With more time I might have come up with a better ending, but as I read it over I felt I was finally starting to find my feet.
The panic returned soon enough. The upcoming Christmas deadlines required several columns to be done in advance. Over the next few weeks I wrote almost exclusively about domestic crises – arguments in front of the telly, arguments about the children, the window cleaner, even about the column itself. I filed each one with a sense of failure and a silent promise to myself that I would adhere more closely to the original brief the following week. When I finally managed to write something with a less personal, more sophisticated conceit, I received an email from the Editor, the first real feedback I’d had in months. It said, ‘What happened to the funny wife?’
And that is how I came to be splashing my marriage all over the papers. I never really had time to sit down and consider the ethical implications, if any. I know other people see writing about one’s family as a pursuit full of interesting moral pitfalls, but I lacked the luxury of that perspective. In fact a full six months elapsed before I actually realized what it was I trying to achieve with my new column: I was trying to make my wife laugh.
She is almost the only person who reads what I write in front of me, and I have come to think of her as the planet’s main arbiter of what is and isn’t funny. Even as I was struggling to produce less personal, more abstract columns, I was noticing that she wasn’t laughing at them. She read the Neanderthal one in complete silence in bed one Saturday morning, and then sighed and said, ‘I miss Jon Ronson.’
But she was reliably amused by any column in which she featured, often laughing out loud while reading back her own words.
‘I’m funny,’ she would say, cackling. ‘You just write it down.’
It is, of course, a delicate balancing act, requiring tact, sound judgement and a good deal of empathy, which is why I have on several occasions got it badly wrong.
‘I don’t like when it says, “My wife” in the headline,’ said my wife one Saturday in early 2008. She had never before objected to me referring to her only as ‘my wife’ – appreciating, I think, the half-hearted stab at preserving her anonymity – but spelled out in big letters the term suddenly looked dismissive and belittling, especially in a headline like the one she was reading: ‘I don’t like it when my wife hires people and then leaves their stewardship to me.’ It was an understandable objection, one that required a tactful, carefully worded response.
‘I don’t do the headline,’ I said. ‘They do the headline.’
Some months later she told me I couldn’t write about our eldest son referring to her as a ‘self-esteem roller’, but it didn’t feel like a gem I could relinquish easily. I wrote about it anyway, including her objection in the piece, and decided to treat her stony silence as tacit approval.
Six months after that my wife exclaimed, apropos of nothing, that she would divorce me if I ever wrote that I found her watching Dog Borstal. It seemed like a bluff worth calling.
One rainy day during our summer holiday in Cornwall, she looked up from the newspaper at me with very angry eyes.
‘You’ve gone too far,’ she said. I looked back blankly – by the time the paper comes out, I don’t always remember what I’ve written.
‘What are you talking about?’ I said.
‘You compared me to the Canoe Wife!’ she shouted. Then I remembered: we’d been bickering while watching something on the news about the Canoe Man – who had disappeared after rowing off in what was, I believe, technically a kayak – and his wife, who conspired with him to fake his death so they could start a new life in Panama.
‘I think you’re misreading it,’ I said. When I looked at it again later I could see where I might have inadvertently drawn some parallels between my wife and the Canoe Wife, but I still thought her interpretation required a pretty ungenerous assessment of my intent.
She spent the rest of the afternoon ringing people who she knew would agree that I had gone too far. Under the circumstances I did the only thing I could think of: I wrote about that, too.
More than a year went by before it happened again: this time my wife was furious – properly furious – because I had written something she didn’t like, in a column in which she barely appeared. Her explanation didn’t make much sense to me (I won’t risk attempting to reiterate it), but there was no mistaking her anger.
I realized that it didn’t matter that I didn’t get it; that her reaction was reason enough to stop doing the column if she wanted me too – she didn’t even have to give me a week’s notice. I briefly thought about offering to quit, until I weighed up the chances that she might, in her current mood, take me up on it.
There were a couple of obvious solutions to the problem. I could have steered clear of writing about my marriage, although my wife insisted she was not uncomfortable with the column itself – she just got occasionally pissed off with an infelicitous phrase she thought might get her into trouble at work, although this only happened once, and neither of us saw it coming that time.
I could, I suppose, show her the column beforehand to give her a chance to voice specific objections, but I don’t like her seeing it ahead of time, because then she might not laugh the next Saturday. It’s meant to be a surprise.
To be honest, I wish I’d upset my wife with a callously worded phrase as few times in real life as I have done in my column. I do lots of stupid and unkind things in the course of my marriage, but with the column I get a whole week to figure out where I went wrong and, in effect, apologize.
An obligation to write about one’s marriage carries the risk that one might be reduced to creating conflict simply in order to fulfil a weekly word count. The truth is, I’ve never had to. People may find this hard to believe, just as I find it difficult to imagine a marriage so well conducted that it lacks the disquiet required to sustain a weekly column. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d want to be part of a marriage like that, anyway. Chances are the couple in question wouldn’t be that into it either.
Twenty years ago my wife and I embarked on a project so foolhardy, the prospect of which seemed to us both so weary, stale and flat that even thinking about it made us shudder. Neither of us actually proposed to the other, because neither of us could possibly make a case for the idea. We simply agreed – we’ll get married – with the resigned determination of two people plotting to bury a body in the woods. Except that if you did agree to bury a body in the woods, you probably wouldn’t ring your parents straight away to tell them the news.
Two decades on we are still together, still married and still, well, if I hesitate to say ‘happy’, it’s only because it’s one of those absolute terms, like ‘nit-free’, that life has taught me to deploy