Ted Turner’s Big Love

From Slate.com:

Robert Olen Butler won the 1993 Pulitzer for fiction for A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain, but at the moment a different selection from Butler’s oeuvre is attracting widespread notice within the literary community. That would be the e-mail he recently sent five graduate students (Butler is a professor of English at Florida State University) explaining in bizarrely fine-grained detail why his wife of 12 years, fellow novelist Elizabeth Dewberry, left him to be Ted Turner’s part-time girlfriend. You can read the e-mail below (thanks to Gawker.com, which posted the full text, and to Mediabistro.com, which broke the story).

"Elizabeth has never been able to step out of the shadow of the Pulitzer," Butler explains calmly. "The multitude of small reflections of regard that came my way inevitably threw a spotlight on the absence of those expressions of regard for her." Also, "she was molested by her grandfather from an early age," and later suffered through a "decade-long abusive marriage." Dewberry, Butler explains, "says I saved her life. But de facto therapy as the initial foundation of a marriage eventually sucks the life out of a relationship." Dewberry is drawn to Turner, Butler further explains, because Turner reminds her of her childhood abuser.

To be sure, Butler writes, the man once known in yachting circles as Captain Outrageous already has "several girlfriends." But "it is a very small number, and he does not take them up lightly and he gives them his absolute support when he does. And Elizabeth’s leaving me is as much about the three weeks a month she is alone as it is about the week a month she is with Ted."