La lalalala la la

(In previous years Sophia, while giving birth to Tolstoy’s 13 children and raising them and managing his estate (he was a count) pretty much on her own, also wrote the clean copies of all of his manuscripts out of his nearly illegible drafts—the final draft of War and Peace was 3,000 pages and she copied it seven times, correcting spelling and grammar and offering key suggestions and critiques of the plot; for example explaining to him that people would be more interested in the social or romantic plots, the human aspects, than in the minutiae of the battles and war strategy plots. A few months before his death, Tolstoy named a male friend the executor of his literary estate rather than his wife, who had been doing this thankless job since she was 19, and gave to the public domain all the copyrights to his works that Sophia had previously owned (for her publishing company). She wrote in her diary “Now I am cast aside as of no further use, although I am, nevertheless, expected to do impossible things.”)

Also I shouldn’t be surprised (but I am) at just how many “great male writers” read their wife’s (or female relatives’) diaries and drew a lot of inspiration from them, stealing ideas or even sometimes entire sentences / paragraphs / poems out of them. This is such a recurrent pattern. There’s Tolstoy (who read Sophia’s diaries and also asked her, when she was 17, to show him a short story she’d written, gave it back to her the next day saying he’d barely glanced at it, when he actually wrote in his diary “What force of truth and simplicity!” and used the story as the embryo for the Rostov family in War and Peace), but also William Wordsworth who read his sister Dorothy’s journal and drew a lot from it, and F. Scott Fitzgerald of course. When Zelda was still young a magazine editor offered to publish parts of her journals, and her husband (of 5 months!) said he couldn’t allow it because he drew a lot of inspiration from them and planned on using parts of them in his future novels and short stories. There’s also French novelist Raymond Radiguet who stole his female lover’s diary to write his novel The Devil in the Flesh, and was lauded by fellow male writers & critics for his brilliant insights into a woman’s mind. Which had been copy/pasted from this woman’s diary. [Also, while he didn’t read it until after her death, Henry James’s sister Alice mentions in her diary that he “embedded in his pages many pearls fallen from my lips, which he steals in the most unblushing way, saying, simply, that he knew they had been said by the family, so it did not matter.”] I really love reading women’s journals, and when they were married to a famous writer, you wouldn’t believe how often the person who edited them mentions in the introduction “if some passages sound familiar it’s because her husband was reading her diary and ~getting inspired” ie plagiarising although the term technically doesn’t apply because every word his wife wrote and idea she had was legally his property (just like she was).

“I am to gratify his pleasure and nurse his child, I am a piece of household furniture, I am a woman. I try to suppress all human feelings. When the machine is working properly it heats the milk, knits a blanket, makes little requests and bustles about trying not to think […].“

She wrote this when she was 19, one year into her marriage to Leo and as she was pregnant with the first of his 13 children.

A few years later, when she was 25 or so:

“I am so often alone with my thoughts that the need to write in my diary comes quite naturally … Now I am well again and not pregnant—it terrifies me how often I have been in that condition. He said that for him being young meant “I can achieve anything”. For me […] reason tells me that there is nothing I either want or can do beyond nursing, eating, drinking, sleeping, and loving and caring for my husband and babies, all of which I know is happiness of a kind, but why do I feel so woeful all the time, and weep as I did yesterday? I am writing this now with the pleasantly exciting sense that nobody will ever read it, so I can be quite frank with myself […].“

During her 12th pregnancy she wrote about taking scalding baths and jumping from high pieces of furniture to try and miscarry.  And at one point while reading her husband’s diary (which he told her to read) she found the sentence "There is no such thing as love, only the physical need for intercourse and the practical need for a life companion.” In her own diary she wrote “They ebb and flow like waves, these times when I realise how lonely I am and want only to cry…”

And after like three seconds, where we’re all trying to figure out the punchline because the story clearly hadn’t ended, and John Mulaney quietly says, “Has there been tinfoil on my buttons the whole goddamn show?”

She was, in fact, with him, and she did tell him her date’s name. John Mulaney considered this, looked around, and unplugged his microphone. Leaning in to us, he told us that we were going to trick this guy so fuckin hard. He said, “At some point during the show, I am going to stop and say, ‘Well, you guys know what they say here in Ft. Lauderdale,’ and then you guys are all going to scream back ‘WE LOVE MILKSHAKES!’ He’ll be so confused.”

He then continued on with the show as normal, the drinks guy returned to his seat, and that was that for quite a long time. We thought he had forgotten about it until, at some point during what I believe was his McDonald’s drive-thru bit, he shrugged his shoulders and said, “You guys know what they say here in Ft. Lauderdale…”

Image via Anne Marie Fox/HBO

Gillian Flynn’s wildly successful Gone Girl helped spawn a batch of best-selling mystery novels featuring complex female protagonists. That was sweet revenge for Flynn, whose first novel, Sharp Objects, had been turned down by publishers who didn’t think people wanted to read stories about less-than-perfect women. Now, Sharp Objects has been adapted as a limited series, debuting Sunday on HBO, starring Amy Adams. Our own Lynn Neary talked to Flynn and to the show’s creators – check out her story here.