He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

Because when you learn that a love was manufactured, you do not only lose the future you’d planned; you lose the past you thought you’d had.

Every tender moment had to be re-examined and, one by one, reclassified: the way he’d found me at the gallery, which I’d thought was chance and now understood was casting; the speed with which he’d fallen, which I’d thought was passion and now understood was a schedule; the public declarations, the magazine spreads, the story he told interviewers about the regular girl who loved him before the fame — all of it, I now knew, a script, and I the one actor who did not know she was in a film.

There is a specific vertigo to that.

You reach back for the solid ground of your own memories and find that it was set dressing.