The Gods Don't Like Hubris

Two weeks ago I finally caught up with Happens Every Day, the memoir by Isabel Gillies about the breakup of her marriage. It so profoundly annoyed me that I can't get it out of my mind. I'd hate to go so far as to say that Gillies may have deserved what happened to her, but the constant gloating about the superiority of her "perfect" family life surely played some part. It's not wise to offend the gods.

Of course, her poor choice in men didn't help matters. For those who don't know the background, Gillies is an actress whose handsome husband, an Oberlin poetry professor, left her for a colleague. But "Josiah" had done the same thing to his first wife, while she was pregnant with his child. Red flag, Isabel, red flag.

The weirdest part is that Gillies had also cultivated her rival, "Sylvia"—alternately described as a dead ringer for Audrey Hepburn, Winona Ryder, Natalie Portman, and Irene Jacob—and repeatedly attempts to explain her incredibly creepy reasons for doing so:

"I felt sorry for her because her husband was in New York and she didn't have children, a fabulous house, and a marvelous man, like I had. I wanted to make her feel good about herself."

"To me, she was seeing an example of what you can achieve if you put hard work into a marriage and keep your eye on the ball of your shared goals. We were showing her how it was done."

"What I was doing was trying to lead by example. I wanted her to stay in the town with me and get her husband to come and live there. He was an actor in New York whom I had never heard of [unlike her own well-known self?]. . . . We could make our own cool city, where we could teach what we wanted, be progressive politically, eat organically from our friend's [sic] restaurants, live in cheap, beautiful houses and have many dinner parties in them, raise our babies together, all of whom would learn violin by the age of six with the Suzuki method that was taught at the conservatory."

The gods don't like hubris very much. Happens Every Day is a hubris-fest.

Have I mentioned that Gillies once appeared on the cover of Seventeen and twice dated Mick Jagger? Let's let her tell us, in her own brand of non sequitur–like prose: "Because I was on the cover of Seventeen magazine when I was fourteen and I am an actress, I depend on the fact that, objectively, I am good-looking. Tall, blond hair, odd looks but undeniably attractive. "

Because she made the cover of Seventeen, it follows that she is attractive? And all actresses are good-looking? What is she talking about?

In the sloppily written Happens Every Day, Gillies overuses her parentheses (that is, she digresses much too often), and contradicts herself over and over. Witness how she slips in her history with Jagger: "I didn't even tell [Josiah] I went on two dates with Mick Jagger in L.A. because I didn't want to ruin the Rolling Stones for him." But next she tells us that her husband has never been particularly jealous.

Gillies, who taught a theatre class at Oberlin, then offers her warped theory of education:

"You always want your students to think you look great and to be intimidated by you. It's tricky, the student/teacher relationship. You must be close enough so they feel they can open themselves to you and learn, but not so close that they think you are their friend and can ask you where you got your clothes. You are older than they are, cooler, have much more under your belt."

I'm sure Gillies is a decent-enough person who truly suffered when her husband left her, but did this story really need to be told?