“What’s it like to be married to another writer?”
Someone asks this question, with varying degrees of fascination, every time I do a reading. It’s as predictable as the person who laughs in all the wrong spots, or the question about whether I write in longhand or on a computer, or the fact that there will be at least one person in the audience reading a Michael Chabon novel.1 When writing the bio for my book jacket, I did not know that mentioning I was married to “the novelist Katharine Noel” would spark such interest. It just seemed like a nice thing to do.2 Also, I’d seen other writers do the same thing, and I wanted to show people how lucky I was: Hey, I’m not a lonely schlub!
In retrospect, this was naïve. Just as people prefer their mathematicians to be endearingly deranged, most people prefer their writers to be lonely schlubs. They seem to look at two writers living together as somehow unnatural, a zookeeper’s mistake. Perhaps it goes against our idea of how writers should be spending their time. If they’re not masturbating in the middle of the day, we expect them to be hunting lions or shooting apples off women’s heads or matching drinks with famous painters. We expect them to be suicidal or drug-addicted or generally unhinged. Certainly we expect them to mistreat their spouses, those long-suffering caregivers. We do not expect them to put Elmo puppets on their hands or watch reality TV with their families or launch inquests into who left the washcloth at the bottom of the tub.3
Or maybe I’m wrong. It’s not the bourgeoisness of our life that fascinates people, but the idea of our competing against each other for awards and readers and book contracts. Maybe when Katharine wins the Pulitzer,4 I’ll have a different take, but right now I can’t imagine not being married to another writer.

1 Exaggeration.
2 Also, I insisted.
3 Here Eric makes it sound like it’s me, and not our three-year old daughter, T., who makes him wear the Elmo puppet. Also, when have we ever watched reality TV? Back before T., I sometimes (well, every night that it was on, but that’s only some of the time) watched America’s Next Top Model. Eric would wander in and say snide things that made it very, very hard to hear Tyra Banks, and I’d have to ask him to leave. When he says we watch together, is he counting that? Because I don’t think that counts.
4 Absolutely no exaggeration.