Sure, there’s nothing better than spending two hours in the company of your favorite book. Let’s be real: sometimes fiction gives us what people can’t, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But maybe it’s best we connect with our cherished authors via the page, and keep them out of our social circles. Here are five writer couples whose double date invitation you and your partner should politely decline.
Image courtesy of New York Social Diary
Most of us would give an arm and leg for half of Zadie Smith’s brains and beauty. The british novelist has wit, style, and substance a plenty, not to mention one of the coolest speaking voices known to man. Her aura is so intimidating, I’d need a xanax just to stand next to her on the subway. So I can’t imagine sitting through a double date with Smith and her partner-the-poet, Nick Laird. Between Nick’s suave Irish padder, and Zadie’s unflappable coolness, passersby would wonder why the couple was dining with a couple of orangutans.
Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre
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Are you kidding me? How did these two stand in a room together without triggering an intelligence supernova? The French are known for their effortless style and charm, but even the most cosmo elite probably felt like a dunce sitting next to them at a streetside cafe. If they invited you and your partner out for coffee, they would suck the cool from straight from your souls, along with about a pound of cigarette smoke, while they mused about existentialism and feminism. You know, those philosophies they helped invent?
Image courtesy of Poetry School
These two sure had literary power. That much is undeniable. Would you want to have them over for cocktails and scrabble? Only if you feel like bearing witness to a tornado of domestic strife brought to you by two truly eccentric poets. Their marriage ended in a nasty divorce, and a quick flip through Ariel gives one more than enough insight into their drama. Some writers go together like peanut butter and jelly. Plath and Hughes were more like coke and mentos. Or ammonia and bleach. Soooo, rain check then?
Karl Ove Knausgaard and Linda Bostrom
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Any couple should be happy to sit in a dark movie theater with these two any time. Seedy jazz cafe with minimal lighting? Sounds great! Skype date? Sign us up. But if the novelist and poet are in the mood for a park picnic, or anything else where the sun might expose your inferior looks, you’d need your excuse book handy. Americans’ attractiveness gets graded on a curve when you account for the overwhelming gorgeousness of Scandinavians. So you shouldn’t feel too bad about flaking out on this one. Anyone who read My Struggle already knows the story of how they met, and basically everything else about Karl Ove.
Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley
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Something tells me the Frankenstein author and English Romantic poet only dine in somber underground pubs on fog leaden nights. You might be able to engage them in some polite small talk if you can get them to stop telling ghost stories for two seconds. The mingling of their minds was no doubt great for our literary canon, but after the 15th “it was a daaaark and stormy night”, you and your partner will be plotting your escape.
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