{"id":172232,"date":"2025-11-20T10:00:25","date_gmt":"2025-11-20T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=172232"},"modified":"2025-11-21T17:02:54","modified_gmt":"2025-11-21T22:02:54","slug":"postscript-to-an-open-marriage-on-lily-allens-west-end-girl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2025\/11\/20\/postscript-to-an-open-marriage-on-lily-allens-west-end-girl\/","title":{"rendered":"Postscript to an Open Marriage: On Lily Allen\u2019s West End Girl<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Lily Allen. Photograph courtesy of Jean Garnett.<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWho\u00a0is<\/em> Madeline?\u201d asks my daughter. We\u2019ve been singing that new Lily Allen song all morning\u2014\u201cDa da da da da da da who\u2019s Madeline?\u201d; we can\u2019t get it out of our heads. How should I answer? Madeline seems to be a woman with whom the singer\u2019s husband is having an affair? Then I\u2019ll have to explain what an affair is. And wait, affair<\/em> isn\u2019t the word, since Allen and her husband had an open marriage, though the song tells us he\u2019s \u201cbroken the rules\u201d of their arrangement with Madeline \u2026 Anyway, I\u2019m not going to try to explain nonmonogamy to a seven-year-old.<\/p>\n

By a stroke of genius, I hit on the right answer: \u201cI don\u2019t know.\u201d My daughter seems to need no further clarification on the issue, but I\u2019m realizing that I do, actually. That is, I want to understand why for some reason, despite Allen\u2019s deft and amusing sketch of this Madeline person as a vacuous, woo-woo home-wrecker, I feel a certain sympathy with her. I care about Madeline, about her desires and her right to pursue them without being villainized.<\/p>\n

West End Girl<\/em>, Lily Allen\u2019s first album in seven years, is a pop marital memoir chronicling the dissolution of Allen\u2019s partnership with the actor David Harbour in the wake of their agreement to try out nonmonogamy. I get why people are in raptures over this record. There\u2019s a certain phoenix-from-the-ashes satisfaction in seeing a romantically wounded, no-longer-young woman artist explode back into the spotlight with a series of sexy, delectable bops: we love that for her. There\u2019s the earworm indelibility of Allen\u2019s tunes that has my kid humming them while brushing her teeth, the charm and humor of her lyrics, and the generosity of her voice, which confides in us like a friend: we love her for that. She\u2019s very lovable.<\/p>\n

Does it follow that her husband, and his \u201cMadeline,\u201d must be hateable? Because, whether Allen intended it or not, that appears to be one takeaway here.\u00a0West End Girl<\/em>\u00a0has been described approvingly as a revenge album, and the consensus among fans seems to be that Allen sure got Harbour\u2019s ass good, that in the process of transmuting her pain into art she has served him a much-deserved pillorying. Remind me why he deserves this? It does sound from the lyrics like there was dishonesty on his part, but his original sin, in the story of Allen\u2019s record, is that he open-marriaged her. <\/p>\n

The idea of straight open marriage as a thing done\u00a0by<\/em>\u00a0men\u00a0to<\/em>\u00a0women rings a bell. In 2022, after I published an essay on this website<\/a> about opening my own marriage, many commenters expressed a rage at my then-husband that discounted my ability to consent to the terms of my own life. \u201cI couldn\u2019t get past my fury,\u201d wrote one reader, \u201c\u2026 [that] her asshole husband decides he needs new pussy. Fuck that dude.\u201d Many called him a bad father simply for being a man in an open marriage (in fact he is a devoted father and was doing more than half the childcare at that time). Despite my essay being, to my mind, a celebration of the possibilities that nonmonogamy opened for me\u2014as a mother, as a writer, as a sexual being\u2014an alarming number of readers were determined to apprehend it as a story about the domesticity-destroying capacities of the male sex drive. These people seemed to understand nonmonogamy as an inherently coercive male prerogative that vies with the female, maternal, \u201cfamily values\u201d prerogative of monogamy.<\/p>\n

I intend no disparagement of West End Girl<\/em> in wondering aloud whether its popularity is bolstered by its adherence to this archetype. Whatever else it is (frequently delightful, well crafted),\u00a0West End Girl<\/em>\u00a0strikes me as a rather neat, crowd-pleasing, bias-confirming presentation of nonmonogamy that casts male extramarital libido as the bad guy and Allen as the victim who just wants to be allowed to go about the business of being a good wife. On the night of the \u201cMadeline\u201d revelation, in the song \u201cTennis,\u201d Allen has \u201cgot the dinner on the table\u201d; she\u2019s made her husband\u2019s favorite meal. In an earlier track, we hear only her side of the phone conversation in which her husband seems to request an open arrangement, and those snatches of dialogue suggest that this boldly expressive woman has no voice, no will, no option to reject her man\u2019s proposition. We can hear her holding back tears as she says, \u201cI want you to be happy.\u201d<\/p>\n

What is lost, or glossed, in this presentation? Earlier this year, I published another essay<\/a> about leaving my own open marriage to pursue an unavailable man whom I desperately wanted, emotionally, spiritually, physically.\u00a0\u201cDumb cunt, kill yourself,\u201d one stranger wrote to me.\u00a0Sick horny bitch busted uggo retard spinster hag degenerate slut whore<\/em>\u00a0were some of the names I was called. (Also \u201cchopped shit,\u201d\u00a0a curious epithet in that, as something to be, a pile of shit is not made worse by chopping. Is it?) Hundreds of male readers expressed outrage and disgust that I could dare to desire men who weren\u2019t my husband while being, as a mother over forty, definitionally undesirable to them. A female \u201creporter\u201d for the\u00a0New York Post<\/em>\u00a0described me with cautionary \u201cit\u2019s 10 P.M.<\/small> do you know where your children are?\u201d gravity as \u201ca woman who has decided to pursue open relationships, casual sex and situationships into middle age.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it possible that we default to a view of straight open marriage as a husband\u2019s imposition on a passive wife in part because we are, as a culture, still<\/em> threatened by a mother\u2019s extramarital desire? Is it possible that the double standard of female aging articulated by Susan Sontag in 1972 requires zero revision half a century later? Men are expected to go on wanting forever, while for women, \u201cthe time at which they start being disqualified as sexually attractive persons is just when they have grown up sexually.\u201d Are we so viscerally uncomfortable with the force and clarity of a middle-aged woman\u2019s libido that we refuse to conceive of open marriage as potentially liberating for wives?<\/p>\n

This past week, a newspaper editor got in touch with me asking if I would care to join the buzzy conversation around\u00a0West End Girl<\/em>\u00a0by spitting out a thousand words on \u201cwhy open marriage doesn\u2019t work.\u201d I did not care to; I do not see open marriage as an unworkable model\u2014certainly no more so than monogamous marriage. Inviting other lovers into a marriage is a lot like bringing a child into it: both openings unearth\u00a0a relationship\u2019s buried conflicts, and plenty of marriages are going to buckle under the pressures of nonmonogamy just as they do under the stresses of having young children.\u00a0In my own case, open marriage did \u201cwork,\u201d in that my marriage needed to end. Sometimes destruction is precisely the work that needs to happen.<\/p>\n

I would love to hear a version of\u00a0West End Girl<\/i> in which a wife not only heartily consents to and partakes of openness but sings her heart out as she stands under the cascading consequences of her own desire. Because there are always consequences; that is what we open to when we open a marriage, and no provisos, no \u201crules\u201d can fully insulate us from them. Maybe part of our discomfort with nonmonogamy is bound up in a teaching that \u201cgood\u201d romance is safe romance, and that we deserve and owe each other emotional safety. We do not; in our hearts we know this, and in fact part of open marriage\u2019s appeal, and part of its expansive potential, is precisely in how it makes us less safe. The pursuit of desire is a dangerous, vulnerable business; like Roy Orbison sang, love hurts. We can be thankful for this. Where would we be as a species without the mind-altering pain that reckless passion and tenderness and sex and betrayal can cause, the way they can dismantle and force us to rebuild more honestly? What would our art be, what would our music be, if loving was safe?<\/p>\n

I\u2019m listening right now to a song my ex-husband sent me a few weeks ago, \u201cAu Pays du Cocaine,\u201d by the band Geese. The song\u2019s lyrics were written by the band’s frontman, Cameron Winter, whose mother, Molly Roden Winter, wrote More<\/em>, a best-selling memoir of open marriage that attracted many critiques, not only of its author\u2019s blinkered privilege (some have argued that openness is a luxury, and certainly Allen could be a case in point there) but charging that she had been unwittingly open-marriaged by her husband. \u201cYou can change,\u201d Winter bellows in that nauseous bass of his, \u201cbaby you can change and still choose me \u2026 you can be free, just come home, please.\u201d It\u2019s one of the most elegant enjambments of the mess happening inside human longing that I\u2019ve heard\u2014a mess, eternally unrevised, of competing drives for safety and freedom, for chosenness and a self-determining changeability that may at any second defy choice. Of course, I know nothing about this young man\u2019s personal life, but listening to this song, I find myself speculating on how his parents\u2019 transparent grappling with that mess may have influenced him. (Am I being presumptuous? Very well then, I\u2019m being presumptuous; that\u2019s the fun of speculation.) It all gets me thinking: open marriage doesn\u2019t have to either preserve a \u201cgood\u201d marriage or dissolve a \u201cbad\u201d one to be \u201csuccessful.\u201d It might just help produce some great songs. And maybe draw us closer together? Not necessarily as couples, but as a community in endless struggle with what feels impossible about intimacy, what we are suppressing, what we have relegated to fantasy, what is driving us mad, what is hurting.<\/p>\n

Allen\u2019s new music is groovy with hurt, and I can\u2019t help being happy for her from afar that her safety measures failed. One stipulation\u2014that her husband\u2019s affairs had to be with sex workers (“there had to be payment,\u201d Allen sings in \u201cMadeline”)\u2014suggests, to me, a vaguely dehumanizing notion of sex work as somehow cordoned off from human interaction, rendering a partner\u2019s dalliances \u201csafe,\u201d all business, nothing personal. But the personal will out; it bursts upon her in that name, \u201cMadeline,\u201d whose specific reality Allen cannot, at first, \u201ceven process.\u201d She does process it, though, and she puts it to work. For me it is precisely the incursion of the grittily personal into her music\u2014the brusque, meat-and-potatoes diarism of \u201cdinner on the table, tell the kids it\u2019s time to eat\u201d and \u201cDuane Reade bag with the handles tied\u201d and \u201cI wrote a little email\u201d\u2014that draws these airy, catchy tunes down into experience.<\/p>\n

I wonder what Madeline is experiencing. \u201cWho is<\/em> Madeline?\u201d Whoever she is, I hope she\u2019s out there getting hers.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Jean Garnett has published essays in<\/em> The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily,<\/em> and<\/em> The Yale Review. A winner of the Pushcart Prize, she is at work on a book about relationships.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhatever else it is (frequently delightful, well crafted, et cetera),\u00a0West End Girl\u00a0strikes me as a rather neat, crowd-pleasing, bias-confirming presentation of nonmonogamy that casts male extramarital libido as the bad guy and Allen as the victim who just wants to be allowed to go about the business of being a good wife.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2261,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4393],"tags":[67827],"class_list":["post-172232","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-person","tag-featured"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nPostscript to an Open Marriage: On Lily Allen\u2019s West End Girl by Jean Garnett<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"November 20, 2025 \u2013 \u201cWhatever else it is (frequently delightful, well crafted, et cetera),\u00a0West End 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