More than a decade ago, during the final years of Aileen’s marriage to the famed poet Terence Antopol, a marriage that had given her both immense confidence in her own writing and also taken away all of her belief in her ability to love and be loved—this only felt like a paradox, she would later tell interviewers, until you were in a situation just like it, where a brilliant mind mirrored yours, rewarding your most profound thoughts, but where, too, a flesh-and-blood man whose knees you wanted to go at least a little weak in your presence affronted you so regularly with the basest insults that you could not for a moment find yourself attractive in any traditional sense—she undertook an inquiry into just how much poison she could spoon into her husband’s coffee before he died. Her prison novels were critically acclaimed and sold well.
©2020 Ben Greenman/Stupid Ideas
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