Ryan Fox, Hannah Pittard, Andrew Ewell, and Anna Shearer in 2011. Photo: Courtesy of Hannah Pittard

This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

The broad empirical facts are not disputed. Four friends: Hannah Pittard, Andrew Ewell, Anna Shearer, Ryan Fox. Two marriages. Years ago, they fell in together in and around the world of postgrad creative writing at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. There’s a photograph from back when things were still good, all of them huddled together on a couch in a pose of easy camaraderie: four artists only beginning to discover the ways ambition might reshape their lives. They all stayed friends until, in the first week of July 2016, Andrew, who was married to Hannah, slept with Anna, who was married to Ryan. A couple of weeks later, Hannah found out. Soon, both marriages were over.

It’s the kind of story — one of turmoil, epiphany, evolution, damage, hope, betrayal, rancor, joy — that, as specific and tumultuous as it may be to each person living it, plays out thousands of times every day. And in its wake, each of those involved finds their own way to deal with it. Some suppress it all in silence. Some lean into forgiveness, some dive headlong into recrimination. Some endlessly replay, some yearn to forget. But whichever choices are made, the blast radius is usually localized. Explosions like these are forever going off all around us, but you’d barely know.

Then there are writers.

. . .

Somewhere in the void between “Write what you know” and “Do no harm” sits a whole world of possibility. In this, too, everyone involved must find their own way. I’m sitting outside a restaurant in the center of Charlottesville discussing such things with Andrew Ewell. Earlier this year, Ewell published a novel, Set for Life. Its narrator is unnamed, but his initial circumstances closely mirror what Ewell’s once were: a frustrated writer married to a more successful novelist, the two of them teaching in the English department of a liberal-arts college, his job offered as a “spousal hire” to help lure her. In the novel’s first chapter, the narrator, on his way home from a writing fellowship in France, stops over to see his and his wife’s good friends, a couple living in Brooklyn. (In the book, they are named Sophie and John and his wife is named Debra.) Near the end of chapter one, the unnamed narrator sleeps with Sophie.

Over the next two days, Ewell and I will spend much of our time discussing the abstract parameters that govern what one can and can’t do when one sits down to an empty page. Which, in his view, is mostly can. “I think that’s the only rule for writing: Everything’s fair game,” he says. Later, he clarifies this somewhat. “I think if you produce shitty work and you’re just airing dirty laundry and it doesn’t rise to the level of art … I mean, then what’s the point? But if it communicates something sincere in the manner that you hope art does, then that justifies the risk. Don’t make shitty art, I guess is what I’m saying.”

Ewell is far from the first writer to pivot on the intimate details of their personal life. But one circumstance in which he finds himself is somewhat less commonplace. In May 2021, he sent the manuscript of Set for Life to an agent. That November, he learned some disconcerting information.

In his novel, the narrator — who in this fictional world initially returns to live with his wife, his affair still secret — eventually realizes that his wife has known about the affair for some time and has been writing a book that will chronicle the disintegration of their marriage. Now, in the real world, Ewell discovered that a version of his story was actually happening. His ex-wife had written a book about their falling apart, and it would be published nine months before his.

Hannah Pittard’s We Are Too Many, a book billed in its subtitle as “A Memoir [kind of],” was published in May 2023. The scene is set by the first sentence of its back-cover précis: “In this wryly humorous and innovative look at a marriage gone wrong, Hannah Pittard recalls a decade’s worth of unforgettable conversations, beginning with the one in which she discovers her husband has been having sex with her charismatic best friend, Trish.”

Exactly how fully this event defines either book is something that the authors at times fiercely dispute — an argument that will seem sometimes to be about writing, sometimes about the contested debris of past relationships. But let’s use a term that both books employ in different contexts: the “inciting incident.” At the very least, these two books share the same inciting incident. And often much more than that.

A few weeks after I speak with Ewell in Charlottesville, I meet Pittard at a Mexican restaurant in Lexington, not far from the University of Kentucky, where she is a professor in the English department. Before any food has arrived, she is already describing herself to me. “I can’t remember when I wasn’t writing and making shit up,” she says. “I think everyone in my family now, if you ask them, would tell you that I am a liar. And they would say that, I think, with great love. I always thought there was a better way of telling something that happened. There was always a better ending. There was a better twist.”

Pittard tells me that when she was young, she had trouble fitting in. She went to Deerfield, a fancy boarding school in Massachusetts, and she used to talk to her reflection in the mirror about becoming a different version of herself — one who was outgoing and fun, and could admit to wanting to be pretty, and would say “yes” to going to parties, and wouldn’t cry so much. It was a long process, but by the time she arrived in Charlottesville, it was beginning to happen. Her new friend Anna Shearer, whom she met on her first day of the writing program (Shearer was beginning her second year), was part of it. “She was stunning,” Pittard says. “She stood out. She was cool. She looked Parisian. She was confident. She looked the way I wanted to look, and she paid me attention, and it was so addictive and flattering.”

Soon Pittard also knew Ryan Fox, a poet and bartender who was dating Shearer. Ewell was the last of the four she met. After Pittard’s first published short story appeared in McSweeney’s in 2005, someone told her that there was this musician who had dropped out of grad school “who was going to write a takedown of McSweeney’s and how it was just like this hipster place to publish stories.” They were talking about Ewell. Soon afterward, she was taken to see a well-liked local band, American Dumpster. Ewell was the guitarist and, at the time, dating the band’s washboard player. It was Shearer who introduced the couple-to-be — in Pittard’s memory, she said, “You’re the only two dorks I know who play Scrabble — you guys should play Scrabble together.” So they did. For a couple of years, they were friends. Then they were together. Five or six years after becoming a couple, in December 2012, they married.

Pittard’s first novel was published in 2011, a second two years later, and one version of her marriage leaks around the edges of her promotional interviews for these books. In 2013, she referred to Ewell as “the love of my life.” Later that year, facing down a pushy TV interviewer who wanted her to talk about infidelity, she declared that she would never cheat on her husband and he would never cheat on her: “He’s an open book. He’s great. He’s the best. He’s the most loyal person in the world.”

This rendering of their relationship does resurface now and then in my conversations with Pittard. “I had wonderful times with him,” she tells me. “When we were good, we were so fucking good. He could be fucking funny as shit. He could be charming. He could be so sweet.”

Much of what she most treasured seems to have been anchored to their shared passion for the written word. “I’ve never talked to somebody about writing fiction and enjoyed it so much as I have with Andrew,” she says. “One of my favorite things to do would be to read the same book and to talk about it at the craft level. We’d read lines aloud to each other. That really sustained us for a long time.” She pauses, as though assessing whether to voice the sentence cued up in her head. “I never loved his writing,” she eventually continues. “I thought that it read like somebody who had read a ton and understood story as much as anybody understood ‘story,’ in quotes. But I’ve never liked