#denise grollmus

[joanofarc]

aquaduct st., pololeo (2002).

and i'll sail the ocean just to be with you

[vinylfromthevault]

The Black Keys “The Big Come Up” released on yesterday’s date, May 14th, fifteen years ago in 2002. White vinyl on Alive Records. May 14th was also Dan Auerbach’s birthday (b. 1979). The Big Come Up was The Black Keys’ debut album, famously recorded in Patrick Carney’s freezing cold basement on an 8-track tape recorder, providing the recording with a lo-fi grainy quality that mimicked their deep blues influences. They cover a couple of these: Junior Kimbrough’s “Do The Rump” and the traditional blues song “Leavin’ Trunk” (originally credited to Sleep John Estes and recorded over the years by Taj Mahal,  Harvey Mandel, Tedeschi Trucks Band and probably many others). Also: the main riff on “Busted” is heavily influenced by “Skinny Woman” by R.L. Burnside. The Black Keys bring a garage punk inspiration onto the album with a cover of The Stooges’ “No Fun” which only appears on the vinyl release, as well as classic rock on their rendition of The Beatles’ “She Said, She Said.”  The Black Keys’ originals are also stellar, my favorites include the boogie blues “Countdown” and the raucous “Yearnin,’” and the 60′s go-go tinged “Them Eyes.”

With the release of this debut album, The Black Keys helped (along with The White Stripes and other less well-known bands) usher in yet another blues renaissance to popular music. On the back cover of the record, Denise Grollmus writes “...when you place this record on your turntable you’ll suddenly realize that - somewhere, somehow - there are people who are rekindling the life of truly soulful music. At first, the quality of the recordings may force you into nostalgic distance. You may be thinking to yourself that it is impossible for two young white men in 2002 to have made such a recording. Think again.”

[topmixtrends]

IN HER LATEST BOOK, The Recovering: Intoxication and Its Aftermath, Leslie Jamison writes “‘addiction’ has always been two things at once: a set of disrupted neurotransmitters and a series of stories we’ve told about disruption.” In many ways, The Recovering acts as its own sort of disruption of how those stories are told. Not only does Jamison bring together a variety of disparate perspectives on addiction and recovery — articulations that are often kept apart from each other — but she does so in a way that transgresses both the boundaries of genre and competing sensibilities about what makes a story worthwhile.

Anchored in the personal narrative of Jamison’s own experience with alcoholism and recovery, The Recovering places Jamison’s story in conversation with those of literary figures whose work — drenched in the mythos of “whiskey and ink” — inspired her, as well as those of ordinary strangers she encounters both in her reportage and in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, and the larger social history of how addiction was pathologized, criminalized, and racialized throughout the 20th century. As a patchwork of memoir, reportage, literary criticism, and cultural analysis, The Recovering also draws attention to how Jamison’s training as a creative writer, literary scholar, and AA member informs her story in ways that productively challenge how stories are differently constructed, interpreted, and valued in those contexts.

I spoke to Jamison about the various conceptual, stylistic, and discursive bridges she attempts to construct throughout the book, as well as what it was like to translate her story from the rooms of AA into a dissertation on narratives of addiction and, ultimately, into a work of popular nonfiction.

¤

DENISE GROLLMUS: The Recovering draws its energy from the tension that exists between the competing narratives we tell about addiction. There’s your personal story, the stories told by and about literary figures, the cultural history of race and addiction, the stories you encounter in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous, stories you collected from other rehabilitation institutions, the psychoanalytic discourse, the medical discourse. Your book gestures to how the discourse of addiction is as profuse and conflicted as the need it attempts to describe. How did you manage your way through that profusion and not get overwhelmed by it?

LESLIE JAMISON: The most honest answer is that pretty early on I had to completely surrender the fantasy or the delusion of comprehensiveness on many levels. Like on a very basic level, when I told anyone about my dissertation or about this book, they would immediately ask, “Are you writing about this book? Are you writing about this novel? Or this author? Are you writing about the opioid crisis?” When you bring up the subject of addiction, the subject moves in 10 thousand different directions, and almost always, my answer was going to be, “No, I’m not writing about that” or, “Oh! I left that out.” And the immediate impulse for me was to feel a sense of shame, in the same way as when someone asks, “Have you read this book?” and I haven’t, because some part of me feels like I should have read everything and have something to say about everything. At a certain point I just had to say: This is a book about addiction, it’s not the book about addiction, so there’s going to be a lot that it doesn’t cover.

That said, through revising different drafts, I definitely did bring in discourses that had been absent from earlier drafts. Like, in the earlier drafts, I didn’t discuss at all medical definitions of addiction, or what addiction looks like in the brain, or what a doctor might say about addiction. But early readers also really encourage me to think about how literary accounts of addiction looked next to how medical science tries to illuminate addiction, or to consider what a doctor would say about how a 12-step program tries to respond to addiction. The goal was to try and bring in those modes of understanding addiction, even in fleeting ways, just to see how they could be in conversation with each other.

How did you end up choosing the discourses and stories you did include alongside your own?

Some of it had to do with the question of who the important people and the important voices were to me as a reader and as a person trying to get sober, especially in terms of the authors and artists I included. So, to some extent, it is unapologetically subjective and arbitrary in the sense that these are voices that happened to matter to me. But that basic architecture of the book also evolved. At another stage, I started to feel incredibly claustrophobic about the book simply being my story engaging with the stories of creative people whose work had been important to me, which is what motivated the choice to bring in the larger social history and the racialized nature of how addiction has been understood and prosecuted. I also wanted the book to work structurally in a way that was somehow akin to a meeting, but I didn’t want the stories that were populating that meeting to simply be the stories of famous writers. So, I wanted to include the stories of ordinary strangers, but I also didn’t want to include the stories of people I had met through recovery in a very detailed biographical way. I knew that I needed fully developed stories of strangers and I needed them to be people I met and approached as a writer, where the contract was clear that I was talking to them about their lives, because I wanted to put their lives in a book and make sure that they were comfortable with that exchange. That emerged from my desire to create a chorus of strangers in a way that wasn’t just me relating to people through their archives, but also me relating to other human beings that I was encountering. That was what motivated the turn to the Seneca House stories.

One particular tension that really struck me was how the pathos of your personal story is so sharply juxtaposed with the reportage style of the social history that you tell about the racist evolution of the drug scare narrative in 20th-century America. Though these two threads and their competing styles become more integrated toward the end of the book, the way they initially sit next to and apart from each other highlights how race, class, and gender inform whose pain is made visible, what that pain is allowed to look like, and how that pain is treated with compassion or not.

The truth is I felt a tremendous amount of anxiety about how these various stories were going to integrate. A few years into writing the book, I realized that I needed to contend with how the ways I had been allowed, encouraged, and given the means by which to articulate my own pain lived alongside racialized, punitive responses to addiction throughout 20th-century America. I very much didn’t want to just feel that cognitive dissonance and then write a book that was about myself and some other white people whose work I had read. I wanted to somehow allow that cognitive dissonance to become the content of the book itself and to trouble the surface of the book. One of my most important teachers, Charlie D’Ambrosio, always used to tell me that the problem with an essay can become its subject. One of the ways that advice bore out for me in this book was taking the way I felt troubled by my privilege and the ways in which my privilege had inflected how I’d experienced and narrated my addiction and make it a problem that didn’t simply haunt the margins of this book, but could be something the book was wrestling with explicitly.

For so long we’ve lived in a narrative landscape in which a certain type of drinking story is told over here, like in a memoir, and a certain kind of story is told over here, like in a discussion about policy or the opioid crisis. I just wanted to bring those very different stories together. I also wanted to address how that same sort of discomfort also lives in meetings, where people from incredibly different backgrounds are coming together under the belief that they can somehow gain something from listening to each other’s stories, even though those stories are often marked by vastly different levels of privilege and vastly different ways in which people have been allowed to express their pain or have their pain witnessed. So, the way in which I would feel uncomfortable in meetings about why anyone would want to hear what I have to say when people in this room have been through so much more, that same anxiety became part of the writing of the book itself.

Aside from the tensions between these different stories, you also touch on the tensions between the competing ways you were trained to be a reader and writer in different institutions, from the MFA program at Iowa and the PhD program at Yale, to the storytelling practices in the program of AA. As someone who is also in recovery and is also working on an academic project about narratives of addiction, I very much related to your description of straddling the huge rift between academia and recovery, largely because of how reading practices in the academy are so heavily dominated by the hermeneutics of suspicion, while the approach in AA is so inherently and necessarily reparative. A lot of literary scholarship reads the narratives that addicts tell about themselves as one Foucauldian nightmare after another, which is so antithetical to the way we interpret our stories in a space like AA. How did you bridge that divide while working on the iteration of The Recovering that was your dissertation? And how did that inform the current iteration?

That all really resonates, especially since I was basically trained as a close reader and didn’t particularly come from any theoretical background, so by the time I arrived at my PhD program, I was sort of like an idiot savant. I didn’t know anything about theory, and I hadn’t really spent time thinking about textual history as a way of coming at literature. It was sort of an embarrassment to me how much I didn’t know, but also a revelation to start spending time in archives and to realize how much I loved both investigating textual production in a very concrete and visceral way. I also became fascinated by the conversation between texts and institutions, and between texts and the larger contexts they came from. That fascination played out in the dissertation, where each chapter was a conversation between a literary text and then some sort of institution or set of institutional texts.

My advisors also ended up being a wonderful set of counterweights for me, because each one of them had a certain kind of suspicion that they brought to the table. For [Caleb Smith], one of my advisors, Foucault shapes a lot of how he thinks about the world and about texts. He does a lot of research and writing about prisons, and the way that prison has shaped the American imagination, so he’s pretty suspicious of institutions, and he was like this godsend for me. Where I’m predisposed to affirm or find something constitutive or saving, his whole approach to something like AA is filled with suspicion about what sort of behavior or narrative is being coerced by this social pressure. Far from feeling like these more suspicious modes of thinking or reading were obstacles, I felt like I was getting tremendous amounts of useful pressure to clarify and interrogate what I was thinking, so there was something so great about the process of incubating a lot of ideas and certainly conducting a lot of archival research under the auspices of my dissertation.

But at a certain point, I also knew that I wasn’t invested in the text of the dissertation. I knew I didn’t want to become a scholar or publish a monograph. I knew I wanted to write this crazy, hyper book, and I wanted one of its strands to be literary criticism and archival research. My dissertation was really a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. I wanted to use all of that research, but I wanted to rearticulate it in what felt to me was a more natural writing voice, rather than an academic writing voice. I wanted to use that work to sustain and feed this bigger, more nebulous project that I felt more committed to.

There was no part of your personal narrative in your dissertation, then?

Not at all. My dissertation was definitely pretty far on a continuum in terms of what the Yale English Department was willing to tolerate. To write something that was verging into personal narrative would have been beyond its upper limits, I think. And by the time I submitted my dissertation, I knew that it would feed this other book, so I didn’t feel any need or desire to put my personal narrative into the dissertation, because I was already sculpting this other book, where I knew it would have a place.

In the book, you express an anxiety about writing “another” addiction memoir, or even worse, you say, a work that would be described as “not just another addiction memoir.” And even though you do describe it as a chorus or “an anthology held together by earnestness,” the personal narrative really anchors the book. What were the stakes of including your personal narrative? Why not write a cultural history of addiction based in the stories of others? What was generative or crucial about including yourself despite your apprehension?

It’s an important question. For me, some of it has do with how my own creative desires are connected to narrative and specificity and the sort of creative writing I’ve always wanted to do. For years, I just wanted to be a fiction writer and I only wrote fiction, and I was so drawn to the idea of bringing a reader along on a story and making that story as lushly habitable as possible, to have it full of the granularity and viscerality of lived experience. And that’s always how I wrote. My writing was always full of sensory details and small moments of observation. That kind of granularity was always the kind of writing that was exciting for me to do. In nonfiction, there are lots of ways to access that sort of granularity, and certainly reporting, if you are taking notes and doing your job right, you can collect that specificity. But I felt that my own story was the story I had the best access to on a really crude level. That’s not to say that we have perfect access to our own lives, because I think self-delusion and imperfect self-knowledge are real, and we’re always questing to understand our own lives, rather than existing in some a priori state of understanding our own lives. But I was excited by the idea of anchoring the book with a spine of personal narrative, because I did want the book to have the momentum of a good yarn, of a narrative that was unfolding where you wanted to know what happened next, where you had all that specificity and the mess and grit of life, and my life was the life that felt the most readily available to use to anchor it and be that spine.

The choice to place that story so centrally among the other research also seems to speak to how the addict was also once the expert of her own experience. Like in the 1820s, before the consolidation of the medical field, Thomas De Quincey was being invited to speak at medical conferences, and his personal account of opium addiction wasn’t just an object to be studied, but it was accepted as a rigorous study of addiction in and of itself. And then, less than 20 years later, doctors start dismissing his accounts as little more than the unscientific, literary musings of a junkie. The addict becomes someone to study, not someone who can do the studying.

I hadn’t known that about De Quincey, but it really resonates with something that became really interesting to me, which was tracking [the founder of AA] Bill Wilson’s story as he told it in different contexts and what he chose to accentuate depending on what audience he was speaking to — like what he put in his autobiography or his story in the Big Book versus what he chose to include when he published his story in the New England Journal of Medicine. He definitely toned down “the great clean wind of a mountain top” rhetoric to present himself in a way that spoke to authority. And the fact that the New England Journal of Medicine was publishing his story said something about what they considered an authority or a voice worth representing. But he also felt like he had to skew his story in a particular way to make it credible in that context. And I also think there’s a pretty inherent traction and siren call to hearing the story of a particular individual. That’s not to say there aren’t all kinds of things that are compelling about stories on larger scales or social stories or the larger story of how Americans have understood addiction in completely schizophrenic ways throughout the 20th century. But there’s something about returning to the scale of the individual life that speaks to something pretty basic about human curiosity and what people are compelled by, enchanted by, and captivated by. It also speaks to how the logic of an AA meeting works. A meeting is a room full of experts on their own lives who are simultaneously being taught that they aren’t fully experts on their lives.

But in the rooms of AA, expertise is often collaboratively constructed. Nobody has all the answers. Instead, you come to a discussion meeting, for example, and you say, “I’m having this problem,” and then 20 other people offer their own iteration and approach and by the end of the meeting, the group conscience, or the chorus, as you call it, becomes the expert, really.

Yup, yup, yup. and I think that’s part of the reparative work I was trying to do with clichés in the book. I was trying to suggest that, for the super self-conscious, hyper self-aware person, part of what the cliché can do is disrupt that sense of expertise. Or to suggest that perhaps this simpler explanation that feels far too interchangeable to apply to you actually has something to teach you about your own life that you might not already understand.

I’m intrigued by what happens when the stories we tell in the rooms of AA become literary memoirs and AA clichés are embedded in literary language, which is supposed to be evacuated of cliché. Part of me revels in the transgression, while the other part of me — the part also trained in an MFA program — wants to scream: “lazy writing!” That move, which you see in works like Mary Karr’s Lit, for example, challenges aesthetic value in generative ways. What are some of your favorite AA clichés?

One of the things I think is lovely about how expansive the AA network is that I’m never quite sure what is an AA cliché or just a cliché. I always love the one, “sometimes the solution has nothing to do with the problem,” because it is such a useful antidote to my natural impulse to solve a problem by thinking about it hard enough or thinking about it intelligently enough. This idea that maybe the answer to the problem was getting coffee with a stranger, instead of analyzing my own life ad nauseam, was so useful. I also like “feelings aren’t facts,” although I also speak about them endlessly. And “one day at a time” is basic, but the number of times I’ve had to invoke it to help me through the moment is infinite. Then, there’s this one, I don’t know exactly how it was formulated, but this one man always used to say it at meetings: “Things don’t always get better, but they always get different.”

¤

Denise Grollmus is a writer, teacher, and literary scholar based in Seattle. She is currently working on a PhD at the University of Washington, exploring how narratives of addiction use religious discourses and concepts in order to complicate medical and popular models of addiction.

The post “An Anthology Held Together by Earnestness”: A Conversation with Leslie Jamison appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books https://ift.tt/2rbNxwT

[robinsoncenter]

Three New Composition Courses in Spring on Digital Storytelling, Podcasting, and Composing Borders

The EWP is offering three upper level courses that may be of interest to students in all majors. They fulfill "C" or "W" requirements and all work toward our new exciting Writing Minor! More information can be found on the minor here:  https://english.washington.edu/writing-minor.

Below you will find the descriptions and times of these three sections. 

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact Candice Rai at crai@uw.edu.

English 381: Podcasting: Storytelling in Audio  (TTH 12:30-2:220, SLN 21424)

This     course will acquaint students with all aspects of podcasting in order to     help them become dynamic storytellers and develop a more expansive     understanding of writing in the digital age. It will enable students to     think critically about the stories they consume and will give them a     working knowledge of current trends in audio production and narrative     techniques. Alongside learning how to consume podcasts rhetorically and     critically, students will practice the art of brainstorming feasible and     compelling story ideas, conducting background research, sound gathering,     interviewing, script writing, audio editing with Audacity, and developing     a narrative voice. Over the course of 10-weeks, each student will create     one feature-length podcast on a subject of their choice.  In order to     generate ideas and help students make sophisticated rhetorical choices, we     will listen rhetorically to a wide variety of podcasts and speak with     several different podcast makers and journalists about their process. This     class will also function much like the collaborative atmosphere of a     newsroom, where students will share their expertise, pitch and workshop     their stories together, and work as assistants on each other’s projects.     Students will also be asked to work together to devise the rubric with     which their podcasts will be assessed.

English 381 is an advanced writing course open to all majors that would be ideal for students considering     careers in any number of disciplines, including Business, Engineering,     Law, the Sciences, or the Humanities or pursuing advanced academic     work in English, Communication, or related fields. The course satisfies     the "C" or "W" requirement at UW and has no     pre-recs.

Email     instructor Denise Grollmus, at grolld@uw.edu, for more information.

English 381: Composing Borders: Art and Boundary-Making Practices in Everyday Life (MW10:30-12:20, SLM 21426)

This     a composition course that is designed to explore one of the most basic     aesthetic and conceptual operations in poetry, prose, painting, photography,     sculpture, visual texts, and perhaps thinking in general: drawing the     line. From the ways poets measure their line, artists produce preliminary     sketches, and experimental filmmakers challenge narrative conventions to     the way lines, grids, and shapes structure ordinary space-time encounters,     we will consider various line-making and boundaries practices in everyday     life. We will pay close attention to the way texts and art objects are     made in order to evaluate (and even experiment with) the role of border/boundary     drawing in writing. The breadth of material in the course is meant to give     students the opportunity to work on writing projects—both analytical and     creative—that are meaningful and important to them. In the process, we     will reckon with a series of central questions together, including: How     are identity, memory, and sensual experience affected by lines, borders,     and boundaries? How might an artful drawing of a line help us reimagine     our place in the world? How do new digital composition technologies affect     aesthetic encounters? Are there fundamental conceptual or practical     similarities between drawing lines in the arts and in writing?

English 381 is an advanced writing course open to all majors that would be ideal for students considering     careers in any number of disciplines, including Business, Engineering,     Law, the Sciences, or the Humanities or pursuing advanced academic     work in English, Communication, or related fields. The course satisfies     the "C" or "W" requirement at UW and has no     pre-recs.

Email     instructor Zachary Tavlin, at ztavlin@uw.edu, for more information.

English 382: Digital Storytelling: Translating Projects & Connecting Audiences (TTH 11:30-12:50; SLN 13860)

Multimodality     is an approach to composition that recognizes and uses multiple modes of     communication �� linguistic, visual, spatial, aural, and gestural.  In     many instances, this means digital communication across contexts,     communities, and cultures.  In this advanced multimodal composition     course, we will be focusing on digital storytelling.  Students should     have an outside research project or community-based work beyond the class     they can translate and present as a digital story for a particular     audience or audiences.  Narrative is a powerful way of communicating     and learning across fields from humanities to STEM and students are     encouraged to make connections between their work in this class and other     courses or communities.  There are no prior technical skills required,     but this is a computer integrated class, so prior knowledge and skills are     welcomed.

English 382 is a multimedia writing and professional communication     course open to all majors that     would be ideal for students considering careers in any number of     disciplines, including Business, Engineering, Law, the Sciences, or the     Humanities or pursuing advanced academic work in English,     Communication, or related fields. The course satisfies the     "C", "W", or VLPA requirements at UW and has no     pre-recs.

Email     instructor Holly Shelton, at hshelton@uw.edu, for more information.

[helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog]

Michelle Branch Announces Her Engagement to Black Keys Drummer Patrick Carney: See the Ring!

A special birthday surprise! Michelle Branch announced her engagement to Patrick Carney on Instagram on Monday, posting a stunning photo of her art deco ring. “Thank you for all the birthday love and wishes. Last night, right before I blew out my candles, @officerpatrickcarney asked me to marry him and then I had nothing left to wish for. 34 might be the best year yet,” she captioned the photos of her new bling and her birthday cake. MORE: Quentin Tarantino Reportedly Engaged to Singer Daniela Pick Branch’s new fiancé also shared a shot with his lady love, writing, “Happy birthday to my main squeeze @michellebranch I'll be on the road with her all summer and available for salad recipe exchanges!!!! Come check it out.”

Branch was recently touring in Asia and is set to return to the States for a performance in Chicago, Illinois, on Thursday. Carney is a producer and drummer for The Black Keys. He was previously married to Emily Ward and Denise Grollmus.

WATCH: Kelly Clarkson Helps Couple Get Engaged – See The Sweet Moment! The “Goodbye to You” singer filed for divorce from her ex-husband, Teddy Landau, in February 2015. The pair were married for more than 10 years. For more celebrity engagements, watch the clip below!

[returnofthejudai]

It's about 50 minutes long, but Denise Grollmus' episode of the Sounds Jewish podcast is worth a listen for people interested in the secret Jewish history of many Polish families, and how that has shaped modern Poland. I was in tears by the end when she interviews her grandmother.

I will share this recommendation with our followers.

[andrewmcclain]

At the time, Patrick also began a project with a guy named Dan Auerbach. Dan and Pat had played music a couple of times in high school. I knew Dan because he lived across the street from my ex-boyfriend. Dan was a soccer jock who idolized Dave Matthews and G. Love and the Special Sauce. Bands I despised. He was a real macho type who walked around town like a bulldog. He listened to Howard Stern, called his girlfriends “babe” and referred to indie pop as “gay.” I never did like Dan much. And I know he never liked me.

Denise Grollmus' hilarious and disappointing description of Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach.  Denise is Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney's ex-wife, and wrote this piece about the whole ordeal. 

[midwesternmiscreant]

There's a story at the link that clicking on the picture will take you to. I'm sure you've read this story. If not this one, something similar; something that will one day be emulated in a Chuck Klosterman novel. But it hurts so much more when you know it's real, when you hear the evidence to heartbreak in your favorite songs. Is Denise the subject of "The Lengths," or at least what the drummer thinks about when they play it? I'm sure they never play it live. I wouldn't know, though. Now, I don't really care to. Either way, if they payed it or not, it would seem unfair.

Anyways, this story fucked me up. I highly recommend it.

[zingara84]

. . . I always come back to memoir. I just like the honesty. Nothing veiled. No games. Very raw. Very immediate. I think all writing is generally narcissistic and indulgent. Memoir just doesn't dress it up as anything else. I like it for that reason. I'm a fan of brutal honesty.

Denise Grollmus (from "Snapshots . . . A Reflection on the Writing Process)

[helloworlddemo1122-yahoopar-blog]

Michelle Branch Announces Her Engagement to Black Keys Drummer Patrick Carney: See the Ring!

A special birthday surprise! Michelle Branch announced her engagement to Patrick Carney on Instagram on Monday, posting a stunning photo of her art deco ring. “Thank you for all the birthday love and wishes. Last night, right before I blew out my candles, @officerpatrickcarney asked me to marry him and then I had nothing left to wish for. 34 might be the best year yet,” she captioned the photos of her new bling and her birthday cake. MORE: Quentin Tarantino Reportedly Engaged to Singer Daniela Pick Branch’s new fiancé also shared a shot with his lady love, writing, “Happy birthday to my main squeeze @michellebranch I'll be on the road with her all summer and available for salad recipe exchanges!!!! Come check it out.”

Branch was recently touring in Asia and is set to return to the States for a performance in Chicago, Illinois, on Thursday. Carney is a producer and drummer for The Black Keys. He was previously married to Emily Ward and Denise Grollmus.

WATCH: Kelly Clarkson Helps Couple Get Engaged – See The Sweet Moment! The “Goodbye to You” singer filed for divorce from her ex-husband, Teddy Landau, in February 2015. The pair were married for more than 10 years. For more celebrity engagements, watch the clip below!

[artlivefree]

Black Keys Love Story

The love story of a musician and a writer-- through alcoholism, traveling, fame, divorce, and ultimately, demise.   Written by band member Patrick's ex-wife, Denise Grollmus

1. Tin Huey T-Shirt

The day Patrick asked me for a divorce, I was wearing our Tin Huey T-shirt.

It is charcoal gray and the softest cotton, thanks to decades of wear. The neck is perfectly stretched out. Just above my collar bone, there is a tear along the stitching, giving the illusion that the rest of the shirt might spontaneously unravel and fall from my body, leaving me with nothing but a ribbed cotton necklace. There are holes everywhere: under the armpits, around my torso, on my back. My favorite hole is the one along the stitching of the left sleeve, forcing it to drape down over my left bicep and expose my shoulder, as though it were some elegantly crafted evening dress. Still faintly legible across the chest is "TIN HUEY" in stenciled, white acrylic letters, cracked throughout like an antique vase. No matter how much you wash it, it smells like people, rather than detergent. I don't wash it often, because I don't want it to disintegrate.

The shirt first came into Patrick's possession in 2003, when his band, the Black Keys, started garnering national attention, including a spot as the musical guest on "Late Night With Conan O'Brien." Tin Huey's guitarist gave it to Patrick hoping he would wear it on the show. It would be an honor, Patrick said. Patrick was obsessed with any rock band that ever came out of Akron, Ohio -- from big names like Devo and Chrissie Hynde to little-known acts like Chi-Pig, the Bizarros, and, of course, Tin Huey. His uncle Ralph had played saxophone in the band. Patrick remembers his grandparents always playing their only major label release, "Contents Dislodged During Shipment," on the hi-fi. But it wasn't simply the band's sound that enchanted Patrick. It was the possibility of creating something special in a seemingly unspecial town like Akron -- a place where people are not known for making art but for manufacturing tires. He cherished records like the Waitresses' "Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?" because they were definitive proof that maybe he could do the same.

The night Patrick first appeared on national television, I remember thinking, "I will never forget this moment." Sadly, more than seven years later, I have. In order to jog my memory, I search the Internet for a video of the performance. After several hours of sifting through the myriad of music videos, interviews and national TV appearances the Black Keys have made since, I begin to doubt that the moment ever happened at all -- that I had made it up entirely. But then, I find it -- a 3-minute, 34-second snippet of the Black Keys performing on "Conan O'Brien," Aug. 8, 2003.

The video clip begins just as Conan is saying "... guests from Akron, Ohio." The audience's cheers quickly fade into the signature riff of "Thickfreakness" -- a cascade of reverb echoing from the guitar of Pat's band mate, Dan Auerbach. I know that riff well -- I've heard it, literally, hundreds of times. I know when Dan has hit the wrong note, slyly sliding the fuzz into the right one. I also know when Patrick hits in too soon or too late on his drum kit. On "Conan," I notice that he hits in too early and is playing the song too fast, probably because he is nervous. Dan is forced to catch up. The audience probably has no idea -- but I do. Even seven years later.

When the camera finally pans away from Dan singing, I see that Patrick is, in fact, wearing the Tin Huey shirt and I'm ecstatic by this vindication. My memory is no fake. But my victory is too quickly displaced by a sudden surge of tears that surprise me as they stream down my cheeks. He looks so young. Our T-shirt is not yet full of holes. It fits him perfectly -- hugging his tall, fit frame. I can tell that I gave him the haircut he is sporting. I can remember how I used to cut his hair -- leaving it long in the front and close to the head in the back. I would cut it in the dining room of our apartment, while he sat in a chair, a hand towel draped around his shoulders. When I would shape his bangs, I'd often pause to kiss him on the lips, just before moving to the sides of his head, where I'd thin out the hair that sat over the arms of his glasses.

I am certain that he immediately drove home after the taping of the show so that we could watch it together. We would have been sitting on the turquoise futon in our living room in front of our hand-me-down TV. We'd be sipping on beers, high-fiving, and chain-smoking. He'd keep glancing over at me, looking for my approval as I stared at the screen, and then I'd pat his hands with giddy glee. He'd then point out that he played too fast and, even though I noticed it too, I'd kiss away his self-criticism and tell him it was just perfect. And then he'd say, with a glint of embarrassment in his tired, blue eyes: "Do you mind if I watch it again?" And I'd laugh at him and say: "OF COURSE NOT, DUMMY!"

And now, I must stop the clip and close my browser, because I'm suddenly overwhelmed with the memory of how good we once were -- a fact I don't allow myself to indulge, because it hurts too much. Because I don't know that boy anymore. Or that girl, for that matter.

So, instead, I try to remind myself of who we are now and why it's best that we are over. I think about the day he asked me for a divorce. Aug. 4, 2009. Just two days earlier, I had left for Warsaw, Poland, on a two-month research trip for a book I was writing. It was one of the few times in our relationship that I had done the leaving. I always feared that if we were both bouncing around the world for the sake of our careers, we'd never last.

Right before our phone conversation, I was awoken from a nap by a nasty dream. That's when I called him, the chalky taste of afternoon sleep still in my mouth. And that is when he said, in so many words, that he didn't want to be with me anymore.

"You mean, you want a divorce?" I asked.

As I sat there waiting for his answer, an ocean between us, I rubbed the cracked letters of the Tin Huey T-shirt into my chest, like salve into a wound, my worst nightmare before me.

2. A silk-screened poster from the Sept. 22, 2000, Mary Timony (of Helium) concert in Oberlin, Ohio.

I was 19 when we first started dating. Patrick was 20, just six months older. We had known each other since our sophomore year in high school. He was tall and lanky, with pockmarked skin and thick black-rimmed glasses. "An indie rock Abraham Lincoln" is how a friend once described him. We made a comical pair. I was half his size, though my face was just as long and angular. I was just as frenetic and mouthy.

It was one of the best summers I have ever had. We bought matching '70s roller skates from the thrift store and rode around parking lots late at night, his car stereo blasting Thin Lizzy or Pavement. We'd sneak into bars and order cocktails like sloe gin fizzes and Rumple Minze and then dance around like maniacs. We agreed that we were soul mates because we both loved coconut cream pie, salami with mustard, and Camel Lights soft packs. We made paintings, mixed tapes and fanzines, and planned for a future in which we'd always be doing that: making things together. We even started our own little band, just the two of us, sitting in his bedroom, writing silly pop songs about Vespas that we'd then record onto his four-track. In August, when I had to go back to Oberlin, Patrick cried. He didn't want me to go.

It was when he was up on one of his usual visits that we got word Mary Timony would be playing a show on campus. She was the reigning queen of indie rock, the former lead singer of Helium, who'd written one of our favorite songs, "Pat's Trick." "We should try to get on that show!" Patrick said. I handed the show organizers a tape of our songs and that was it. We were the opening act for one of our favorite musicians ever. That's how it always worked with Patrick. He always did what he said he was gonna do.

Patrick named our band Churchbuilder -- a bizarre and esoteric reference to "The Eyes of Tammy Faye," one of his favorite movies at the time. Unfortunately, we soon realized the limitations of my musical skills. For me, singing and playing keyboards proved as challenging as discrete math. Our little duo wouldn't be able to pull it off without help. We quickly recruited a couple of friends to perform with us. We taught them the very simple structures of our four modest songs and then, together, learned how to play "Tugboat Captain" by Galaxie 500 as the final number. Five songs, 20 or so minutes. That would have to do.

That night at the student union, somewhere between the second and third song, I realized that I was enjoying myself. There was a rush to being onstage, having people cheer you on, stare up at you from the crowd like that, laughing at your stage banter. And then, after the show, strangers coming up to you, wanting to get to know you, genuinely excited to talk to you.

After that show, Churchbuilder continued for a bit longer. A small indie label out of Brooklyn, N.Y., put out our record, "Patty Darling." We played a handful of gigs throughout the Midwest and the East Coast. We were lucky if 10 people showed up, but we never cared. At least, I didn't. I had no designs on being a rock star. I wanted to be an academic, maybe a writer. But it was different for Patrick.

At the time, Patrick also began a project with a guy named Dan Auerbach. Dan and Pat had played music a couple of times in high school. I knew Dan because he lived across the street from my ex-boyfriend. Dan was a soccer jock who idolized Dave Matthews and G. Love and the Special Sauce. Bands I despised. He was a real macho type who walked around town like a bulldog. He listened to Howard Stern, called his girlfriends "babe" and referred to indie pop as "gay." I never did like Dan much. And I know he never liked me. He and Patrick were complete opposites with little in common except for one thing: insatiable ambition.

We kept little evidence of our time in Churchbuilder. I think its existence embarrassed Patrick once the Black Keys catapulted onto the A-list of gritty, serious rock bands. For Christmas one year, I framed the poster from the Mary Timony show along with a dozen Black Keys ones as his present. It ended up on the second floor of our house, in my office.

3. "Crazy Rhythms" by the Feelies (on white vinyl)

In the early days of the Black Keys, Dan's girlfriend, Tarrah, and I would accompany Dan and Pat on tour, not because it was such great fun, but because that was the only way we could ever see them. It would be the four of us, piled into Pat's baby blue Plymouth Voyager minivan that stunk of boys. Tarrah and I would help load equipment in and out of clubs, drive and sell merchandise at shows.

During one of the more grueling tours, the band played a show in Athens, Ga. Directly next to the venue was a record store that specialized in rare records. On the wall, they displayed a copy of the Feelies' "Crazy Rhythms" in white vinyl.

Patrick and I were huge fans of the Feelies -- tragic pop songwriters from the late '80s who gave up rock stardom for quieter lives. We particularly liked listening to them in the spring, while we sat out on the porch and pounded Belgian beer. The store was selling the record for $25. When Patrick saw the price tag, his face dropped. We couldn't justify spending that much. He shrugged and walked next door for sound check.

I stepped out of the store for a quick second to think. I lit a cigarette and rummaged through my bag for a bank receipt. My checking account balance: $14.28.

At the time, I had one credit card. A Discover card, no less. It had a $200 limit. About $50 of that was left. But the store wouldn't take credit. I went to an ATM and promptly withdrew what was left on the card, wincing at the thought of the inflated interest rate on such a cash advance. I then headed back to the store and bought the record.

After sound check, I gave it to Pat. His eyes almost bugged out of his head with guilt and gratitude. "But we can't afford this," he said. I just smiled.

In the end, when it came to dividing our 500 records, we didn't really fight. He told me to take what I wanted and leave the rest. I tried to be fair and remember exactly what I had brought into the relationship and what I had acquired, personally, during it. Bikini Kill's "Pussy Whipped" and Nico's "Chelsea Girl" were no-brainers, as were almost all of the bebop records that I had purchased during a "jazz" phase. He could keep the John Cale. And though I wanted to take Nick Drake's "Bryter Layter," it had belonged to his father originally.

The Feelies was the toughest to decide upon. Sure, I'd bought it for him. But there was so little for me to recover of what I gave that relationship. Most of my giving was immaterial. The Feelies record was the only tangible memory of my sacrifice, some physical evidence of my dedication.

A few days after I'd split up our records, he sent me an e-mail. "Did you take that Feelies record? I really want it. It has special memories for me," he wrote. "You bought it for me when we had no money."

"Exactly," I wrote back.

4. A big-ass dining room table

The day I went to our old house to separate records, I also had to place Post-it notes on every piece of furniture I wanted to take with me. The Post-it notes were his idea. He also told me to take anything we'd acquired as a wedding present, including the dining room table that we'd purchased with a gift certificate from one of his relatives. Funny, since I was probably the least ecstatic by the prospect of marriage in the first place.

Two years into our relationship, my parents got divorced. It was a nasty, protracted legal battle. By the time they finally signed the papers in 2005, my mother was basically homeless, my brother had suffered a nervous breakdown, and I found myself at the start of a drinking problem. As for my father, he ran off with another woman to Santiago, Chile, to begin a new life. A fan of marriage, I was not.

Still, when Patrick proposed, I said yes, because what girl would be dumb enough to refuse a marriage offer from the love of her life? Plus, we'd been together six years already and it seemed like the logical next step in a relationship I'd completely built my life around.

We were in Chicago when he did it. He was playing two shows there that weekend. He got us an extra-fancy room at a nice downtown hotel -- something really contemporary and swank with expensive lighting. We probably looked pretty goofy in that room, in our secondhand clothes that stunk of cigarette smoke. We overtipped the staff, a gesture that begged: "Thanks for not kicking us out." It was a far cry from the literally bloodied mattresses of the trucker motels in which we used to sleep.

He opened a bottle of champagne, while I lit a cigarette. He tried to get into a kneeling position, but, at 6-foot-4 inches, he was too tall to do it gracefully. Finally, he gave up, pulled a vintage diamond ring in a simple platinum setting from the chest pocket of his plaid thrift store shirt and asked me to marry him.

I acted as excited as I could, throwing my arms around him and then admiring the ring for as long as I figured any happy bride-to-be would. But inside, I was terrified. I wanted more than anything to want to be married to him. But it felt awkward -- like us in that fancy room. I suggested that we elope, but he said no, he wanted a proper wedding with all of our friends and family present. And that made me even more nervous.

When our wedding day came, my side of the chapel was sorely empty of relatives. My father didn't come, nor did any of his family. Not a single cousin, aunt or grandparent. My brother gave me away in front of my grandmother and my mother. And that was it for family. I made sure to get very drunk before walking down the aisle in order to numb the pain of their absence.

If someone deserved all of our wedding presents, it was Patrick's mother, Mary. In fact, it was Mary who planted the seed of marriage in Patrick's mind.

Just a few weeks before he purchased a ring, Mary took him out to dinner. She asked him why he hadn't proposed marriage yet and if it had to do with the fact that she and his dad had gotten divorced. She told him it was unfair to his entire family for him not to propose to me -- because they loved me and didn't want to lose me.

In many ways, the most enticing prospect of marrying Pat was belonging to his family. Despite their divorce, Patrick's parents managed to overcome their grievances. It was at our house that they celebrated their first Thanksgiving together in almost 20 years -- Jim and his wife, Katie; Mary and her husband, Barry. Soon, we were all vacationing together like one, big happy family.

It only seemed fitting then, that I used the largest Target gift certificate we received to buy something my new family would appreciate. I figured a large dining room table would do. It was rectangular and sturdy and could accommodate up to 10 people, eight comfortably. Before our marriage, I often hosted dinner parties for Patrick's family. They'd scatter about, balancing plates on knees, or eating standing up in the kitchen. Now, we could finally put them all at one table.

In the end, what hurt more than Patrick's request for a divorce was his mother's enthusiasm for one. In fact, it was a voice mail she left for him that signaled the end for me. I heard the message while I was sitting in my room in Poland, just after Patrick and I had talked about how he wasn't happy. I needed to know why. It wasn't my message to hear, but my respect for boundaries had been trumped by growing paranoia. She'd called to leave him the number of domestic court judges and divorce attorneys. "If you get a dissolution it will only take 90 days and if she's difficult, something like nine months. Well, that's it. Off to a girls' night out! Love ya! Bye!"

I can still hear the chipper tone of her voice in my head -- the nasal, Midwestern perkiness. It still makes my stomach turn to think of how complicit she was in all of it and how easy she made it seem to dispose of me.

As for the table: Whenever I look at it, I resent how much space it takes up. But I don't want to sell it or give it away, because I never want to have to buy another like it again.

5. The Futon

Shortly after I moved all of my things out of our house, Patrick called. "Hey, could you also take the futon in the spare bedroom?" he said flatly. "I don't want it."

His request stung. It made me feel embarrassed and dirty. Because I knew exactly why he wanted me to take it.

We had spent a good chunk of our relationship on that futon. When I was at Oberlin, Patrick moved it into my dorm room so that we wouldn't have to sleep on the super narrow, extra-long twin provided by the school. After college, when I first moved in with Patrick, it served as our living room couch, until we finally bought a real sofa, and it began serving as our guest room bed.

By that time, Patrick was constantly on tour. I knew he was leaving because he had to. These were opportunities not to be missed. But that didn't make it feel any better. I tried to keep busy with my job as a newspaper reporter. But mostly, I was sad and lonely. I started drinking by myself. I'd get good and drunk and then I'd call Patrick, crying and screaming. The next morning, I'd wake up with dread over my behavior, call him back, and apologize profusely. "You've gotta stop doing this," he'd say.

"I know," I'd respond. "It's just so hard sometimes."

"It's hard for me, too."

I never knew how to fix it. Then, I made it worse. It was the fall of 2004. I did not love the man I brought home, to our futon. That is not why I did it. I did it because I was furious for being left behind and scared of what Patrick could do to hurt me -- the sort of thing my dad did and the things Dan was doing to his girlfriend while she waited for him at home, putting her life on hold, just like me. I was a fool if I didn't think Patrick was doing the same thing -- even if I had no proof. I wasn't that special.

I remember sitting on the couch the next morning, nursing a 12-pack of Pabst to stop the shaking, thinking of what to do. I decided not to tell Patrick. It would devastate him. Instead, I decided to move out and dry out for a bit. I couldn't be a tour widow anymore. It was killing me.

A week later, I moved out. It was the week before I started a new job, the weekend of my 23rd birthday. Patrick wasn't home from tour yet. I had a few girlfriends help me lug the awkward futon down the back steps of our building and move my stuff just a couple of blocks away to a small efficiency apartment. I also started going to therapy, where I was diagnosed with alcohol-induced mood disorder, a diagnosis that I quickly dismissed because I thought I knew better. I thought, "I don't have problems because I drink. I drink because I have problems."

Patrick blamed himself, for all the touring, all the things he'd asked me to give up. He'd make it up to me, he promised. He'd show me how much I mattered to him. He'd stop touring so much, he'd say. Six months later, I moved back in with him, lugging my secret behind me.

Of course, nothing really changed, because nothing really does. Patrick started touring even more. I started drinking even more. And our fights only grew worse. There was beer thrown. I put a fist through a window. We crashed on the floors of friends' houses after long, drunken battles that would carry on into the wee hours of the morning. Our friends started to believe it was simply our strange form of foreplay.

Then, one night, I couldn't keep it in anymore. It should have been an idyllic night. Pat was home from tour. We'd just spent the day grocery shopping and setting up our Christmas tree. It was only four months after we'd gotten married. Things were supposed to be different. "Patrick," I said. "I have to tell you something."

I was extremely drunk when I made my confession, so I don't remember specific details. I know that I slept at a friend's house that night and that, when I returned the next day, shards of Christmas tree decorations were strewn across the living room floor. Patrick was nowhere to be found. I immediately walked upstairs and collapsed into our bed. I felt I had just ruined the most important part of my life.

Patrick tried to forgive me and we tried to move on, but we couldn't. The last year and a half of our marriage was dark and angry. Even after the divorce, I never could forgive myself for my infidelity. And the pages of the May 27, 2010, issue of Rolling Stone proved he couldn't either.

Then, one night, almost a year after we split up, Patrick called me. He sounded very drunk. And that's when he finally admitted that'd he also been unfaithful to me. Not just with the woman he'd left me for, but before that, even. One time, he said, on tour. He swore that it wasn't sex, just a bit of friendly fellatio, because, you know, he loved me so much he could never go all the way. "I swear that was the only time," he said. Oddly enough, I wasn't angry. I think I laughed. I was also glad that I didn't take the stupid futon, like he'd asked.

6. One audio MiniDisc of the Black Keys' first live performance, July 2002

This audio MiniDisc is a recording I made of the Black Keys. It is their first concert ever. I was one of only five people in attendance. I remember calling our friends and bribing them with shots to come and watch. The show was at the Beachland Tavern in Cleveland, Ohio, a cozy old man bar with Schlitz signs, $1 cans of Tecate, and a small stage that still plays host to a number of random garage bands, some that go on to great fame (the White Stripes) and some that don't (Churchbuilder). Since then, the Black Keys are much too popular to play the Tavern. They are now on the cover of magazines and win things like Grammy Awards.

For that reason, the MiniDisc could be valuable. I could sell it. I know there are some crazy fans out there who'd probably pay several hundred if I put it on eBay. Though, I'm not sure if the dissolution agreement would acknowledge it as my intellectual property or his. Legally, the MiniDisc probably belongs to him. His lawyers brilliantly made sure I had no claim to his musical legacy, despite helping build it. Nothing was said of my intellectual property in the dissolution agreement. It was as though I made nothing of value in our marriage -- nothing important enough to protect with legalese, at least. Still, I signed the dotted line.

But I don't hold onto the recording for its monetary value. I hold it hostage for a sense of what's possible. I keep it so that I can throw it away. I hold onto it because Patrick knows I have it and he likes to think in terms of monetary value. I would like to see if he sues me for it, because then that would prove that he is truly the monster I think he's become -- the monster I envision in my mind so that I will not love him anymore. I hold onto it with the idea that one day, I can mail it to his father, along with a 3x5 index card that says, "I thought you should have this." His father is a gentle man, and would be touched by my gesture, I'm sure. He loves memories. I think he still loves me. Also, if I sent it to Patrick's father, it would prove that I'm not greedy, unlike his son. The danger in sending it is that his father will give it to Patrick and then I will have no more power. I will have completely surrendered.

Mostly, though, I hold onto it because it is a beautiful and a horrible memory cast in sound. It was the beginning of something special. It was also the beginning of our end.

7. One black-and-white photo of Patrick and me, taken in 2003, at Apple Studios

In the year that Patrick and I have been divorced, I have taken to throwing a lot of mementos away -- notes I'd hung onto, photos of him as a child, photos of us together, mix CDs he'd made me, our wedding invitations, wedding cards, backstage passes from shows, anything with the words "The Black Keys" on it.

It is entirely against my nature to destroy evidence. I usually hold onto relics of the past with obsessive zeal. Each purging was painful. But people told me that I had to let go, and so I took them literally, and tried to put what was left of us in the trash.

We didn't have a ton of printed photographs of ourselves together. In fact, there were precisely three that hung in our house. One was of us kissing on our wedding day. The other two were almost exactly alike: us, in black-and-white, in front of the Abbey Road Studios in London.

The first photo was taken in the summer of 2003. Our friend Ben Corrigan took it. In it, we are both flashing genuine smiles in front of a wall filled with Beatles-inspired graffiti. I can tell we are having fun. Life is still an adventure. I might be hung over, but I'm muscling my way through, as I could only do at 22. Patrick is thin and handsome. His hair is long. I'm wearing some insane Hawaiian dress and a calculator watch. His hand is holding my hands, which are rested on his knee. A few months after it was taken, Ben had it made into a postcard that he then sent from London. He wrote, "I love you crazy bitches!" on the back. It was one of the greatest surprises I've ever received in the mail.

The second photo was taken five years later. This time, we actually got to go inside Abbey Studios, because the Black Keys were doing a Live From Abbey Road session. I thought it would be fun if Ben took the same photo of us before we left.

Unfortunately, it was freezing outside and we were in a rush to the venue where the Black Keys were performing that night. Patrick seemed resistant, but I promised it would be fun, so he begrudgingly went along with it. Ben e-mailed it to me soon after we got back. In it, we are all in black. Patrick isn't smiling, but wincing. Our bodies are turned into each other, but it feels so forced. If you set the two photos next to each other, it was so painfully obvious that we'd grown apart.

The day I moved out, I wasn't going to take any photos with me. But then I thought: What if, one day, I have a daughter? Will I have to tell her that I was once married to a man she will never know, but who was one of the most important people in my life? That I was once madly in love with a man who isn't her father, but with whom I wanted to have children? Would I then need to show her some evidence of this relationship? And then, I thought: This is the picture I will show her, an example that things were not always so sad and heavy. In fact, they were wonderful once.

[meskdale]

Denise Grollmus talks about her relationship with and eventual divorce from my favourite half of The Black Keys, Pat Carney.

[gainfulunemployment-blog]

He got us an extra-fancy room at a nice downtown hotel -- something really contemporary and swank with expensive lighting. We probably looked pretty goofy in that room, in our secondhand clothes that stunk of cigarette smoke. We overtipped the staff, a gesture that begged: "Thanks for not kicking us out." It was a far cry from the literally bloodied mattresses of the trucker motels in which we used to sleep. He opened a bottle of champagne, while I lit a cigarette. He tried to get into a kneeling position, but, at 6-foot-4 inches, he was too tall to do it gracefully. Finally, he gave up, pulled a vintage diamond ring in a simple platinum setting from the chest pocket of his plaid thrift store shirt and asked me to marry him. I acted as excited as I could, throwing my arms around him and then admiring the ring for as long as I figured any happy bride-to-be would. But inside, I was terrified. I wanted more than anything to want to be married to him. But it felt awkward -- like us in that fancy room.

Snapshots from a rock 'n' roll marriage - Life stories - Salon.com

This is so raw. Ex-wife of Black Keys drummer reflects on their relationship, marriage and dissolution thereof. No romantic entanglement is special; every one gets giddy or gets hurt in the same way.

[robotgrizzlybearastronaut-blog]

An amazing piece by Denise Grollmus about her marriage and subsequent divorce from Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney.

I love the framework of the article -- going into each story point through an item that has played a part in their marriage. Goes to show how ghosts of relationships can haunt our possessions.