As the discussion surrounding Lily Allen’s fifth album, West End Girl, continues to set tongues wagging, it bears reminding the masses that Allen is hardly the first woman to speak so candidly about the dissolution of a marriage as a result of a cheating husband (though, in David Harbour’s case, the fact that he managed to still cheat by violating the rules of his open marriage with Allen—the one he told her that he wanted after marrying her—makes him a particular kind of fuck-up). Indeed, the most obvious blueprint for this is Nora Ephron with her 1983 novel, Heartburn, which she would also adapt into a screenplay for the 1986 movie of the same name. Thus, she was given a chance to “humiliate” her erstwhile husband, Carl Bernstein, twice. And, by timing the releases three years apart, it was as though the public got to be refreshed on what a cad he was yet again before the decade was over—just in case they forgot (and just in case they didn’t read the book).
Should Allen’s album somehow be adapted into a film or musical, perhaps the same will be said of West End Girl as well (though, for now, going on tour with it will have to suffice as the enduring public reminder about what Harbour hath wrought). Granted, for the moment, it doesn’t seem as though the bad PR surrounding Harbour could get worse, with his Stranger Things co-star, Millie Bobby Brown, having filed a formal bullying and harassment complaint against him over a year ago (only just now coming to light at the same time as West End Girl), before Allen even started getting some things off her chest with that mighty pen of hers.
But, as mentioned, it was Ephron who, arguably, still flexed the mightiest pen of all by writing an entire tome centered on Bernstein’s affair with Margaret Jay, who was also married at the time to the UK ambassador to the United States, Peter Jay. And, like Allen after her, it probably never even occurred to Ephron not to “turn her pain into profit,” as it were. This due to growing up with a mother who effectively told her four daughters, Nora, Delia, Hallie and Amy, to do just that. That mother being none other than Phoebe Wolkind. Known for her screenwriting collaborations with her husband, Henry Ephron, Wolkind was an “unusual” woman for the time in that she was very much career-oriented. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t around to impart wisdom to her daughters now and again. Most frequently, as Nora herself recounted, “We all grew up with this thing that my mother said over and over and over and over again, which was ‘everything is copy.’” In the 2015 documentary of the same name (directed by her eldest son, Jacob Bernstein), she continued (via archival footage), “You’d come home with something that you thought was the tragedy of your life… and my mother would say, ‘Everything is copy.’ I now believe that what my mother meant was this: when you slip on a banana peel, people laugh at you. But when you tell people you slipped on a banana peel, it’s your laugh. So you become the hero, rather than the victim of the joke.”
There’s no doubt that was a large part of Allen’s “motive” for writing the songs on West End Girl, effectively saying as much on “Let You W/In” when she sings, “I can walk out with my dignity/If I lay my truth on the table.” Emphasis on her use of the phrase “my truth” instead of “the truth.” Knowing that language is key to protecting herself from the usual accusation when a woman does some “tattle”-telling after a relationship, which is that “there’s two sides to every story.” Something that Ephron’s sister, Delia, also mentioned when interviewed for Everything Is Copy, noting, “That’s actually naïve. To think that you can put out your version of the story, and that that is the only version to tell.” Of course, no one appears to be very interested in hearing Harbour’s version of the story. Certainly not “the girls and the gays.” And certainly not after getting the lurid details from Allen in her “audiobook” of an album. For, needless to say, she who tells it best—and with the most heightened sense of wryness and self-awareness—is the winner, as it were. Hence, Allen also singing in the same previously mentioned track, “Already let you w/in/All I can do is sing/So why should I let you win?” and “I’ve already let you in/So why should I let you win?/You’ve taken everything.”
Ephron wasn’t content to let Bernstein win either, likely feeling something similar to Allen’s declaration, “I will not absorb your shame/It was you who put me through this.” The “this” being his own glaring infidelity. Though, at that time, the notion of an open marriage wasn’t as “heralded” as it is today (besides that, the whole “swinging”/“key party” trend that crested in the 70s was coming to an end). Not that Ephron would have been on board. Because, for all her talk of women’s liberation, she was still rooted in the conservative convention of her Jewish heritage and upbringing. Allen, in contrast, was expected, in some sense, to be “down” for this type of arrangement because she’s presented herself as being so “liberal” and “open-minded” in the past. And yet, that presentation, billed by The Guardian writer Gaby Hinsliff as “the ‘cool girl’ myth,” is more façade than fact. Moreover, as numerous journalists have mentioned in their dissection of this record, Allen’s own upbringing in an environment of instability naturally makes her yearn for the opposite. In a sense, the same can probably also be said of Ephron, whose own parents’ marriage turned sour the more they both started drinking and the Hollywood screenwriting gigs started to dry up. Acrid exchanges, to say the least, were inevitable. As they were when Allen went along to get along with Harbour’s request for a nonmonogamous relationship (again, bringing this up after they were already married instead of unveiling his proclivities ahead of time).
Something she already started doing when she agreed to move to New York for the benefit of accommodating Harbour’s career. Similarly, Ephron left New York to move to Washington, DC with Bernstein. Which, to her, truly was tantamount to crossing an ocean the way Allen did by moving from London to New York, referencing this with the “Relapse” lyrics, “You pulled the safety net/I moved across an ocean/From my family, from my friends” and also on “Nonmonogamummy” with, “I changed my immigration status/For you to treat me like a stranger.” Ephron did her best to make do with her safety net—New York—being pulled, throwing parties and inviting people over for dinner at their DC house in the same spirit that Joan Didion (another obvious Ephron “parallel”) would in Los Angeles.
But her attempts to make a house a home were not enough for Bernstein. Just as they weren’t for Harbour, despite the elaborate “nest-creating” that Allen endured for the decorating of their Carroll Gardens townhouse (which has since been put up for sale). In truth, some men are repulsed by women who can do both things: be a “homemaker” and an artistic tour de force. Preferring, instead, a woman that’s, let’s say, more two-dimensional because it allows him to unequivocally shine. While Harbour might be the higher-paid one between them (based on his Marvel movie salaries alone), it didn’t stop him from blatantly displaying his jealousy when his wife “impinged” on his acting domain by pivoting to her first theater role in 2021. An even bigger knife dig, from his perspective, considering Harbour started out in theater—with the knife digging deeper when Allen was nominated for an Olivier Award for her role as Jenny in 2:22 A Ghost Story.
His bitterness about the nomination went unmasked on the red carpet, the footage of which has been reanimated and restudied in the wake of West End Girl (with the album’s name being a clear reference to Harbour’s vexation about her success in theater). While Bernstein might have been slightly more secure in his “manhood,” what with bringing down what was then the most corrupt presidency in history, the pattern is familiar. A woman who not only does well in her career, but also makes a career out of her razor-sharp wit is not exactly “sellable” material to most “macho” men in the long run.
Even so, many women, no matter how strong or smart they are, still “revert to people pleasing” (as Allen puts it on “Nonmonogamummy”), bending themselves to fit whatever mold they think will get their significant other to stay. Though asking for fidelity and staying is often too tall of an order for many husbands. And so, in today’s climate of “openness” and the “you can have everything” philosophy, the leaning toward nonmonogamy feels more like a byproduct of too many years spent swiping. A phenomenon that has undoubtedly altered the human brain to believe that the world of “relationships” is nothing but a smorgasbord, with every option meant to be “tried.” Often in a very disposable, detached manner. Which is exactly why Hinsliff concluded her abovementioned article about Allen and the response her album has gotten as follows:
This isn’t what sexual liberation was meant to feel like. It wasn’t supposed to mean squashing your own needs anxiously down to fit some man’s fantasy—whether that involves becoming a downtrodden tradwife or one-third of a throuple—while gamely pretending you want it just as much as he does. Revolutions are liberating only when the freedoms gained are genuine freedoms, not something more closely resembling an obligation in disguise.”
Ephron, who herself covered the unfolding of the “women’s lib” movement, would likely tend to agree. As she would with Allen’s candor on the matter of aging throughout West End Girl. For it was Ephron who was among the first to speak so openly about it in 2006’s I Feel Bad About My Neck and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman. In the titular essay, she writes, “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look in it, I begin squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight. And if the light is good (which I hope it’s not), I often do what so many women my age do when stuck in front of a mirror: I gently pull the skin of my neck back and stare wistfully at a younger version of myself.”
Allen, too, conveys her depression on the matter of aging. Particularly in terms of how women are continuously made to feel as though their appearance is the only value they can truly offer. So it is that, on “Madeline” (Ephron’s “Thelma Rice” is Allen’s “Madeline”), she laments, “I bet he tells you, tells you he loves you/I’ve gotten old, gotten ugly.” Later in the album, with “Just Enough,” Allen gets even more no holds barred about her disgust with the ravages of time via the verse, “Look at my reflection/I feel so drawn, so old/I booked myself a facelift/Wondering how long it might hold.” Ephron is similarly no holds barred when talking about, as her son called it in Everything Is Copy, “the indignities of aging” as a woman. Which is why she also adds during “I Feel Bad About My Neck,” “Every so often I read a book about age, and whoever’s writing it says it’s great to be old. It’s great to be wise and sage and mellow; it’s great to be at the point where you understand just what matters in life. I can’t understand people who say things like this. What can they be thinking? Don’t they have necks? Aren’t they tired of compensatory dressing?”
So it is that Ephron, like Allen, tells people she’s slipped on the proverbial banana peel, and it’s her laugh now. Not just in terms of being egregiously cheated on (at least Allen wasn’t seven months pregnant with Harbour’s second child when she found out), but also finding herself “over the hill” after having to start over again in the dating scene at a “certain age.” What’s more, like Bernstein before Harbour, it’s probable that the latter will suffer the fallout of his actions, presently immortalized in art, for far longer than Allen suffers the fallout of having her heart broken by him. As for the small percentage that does feel sympathy for Harbour, it bears noting that he really ought to have taken into account Allen’s history of “writing it all down” (particularly when she’s been done dirty by a bloke—hear also: “Smile,” for Allen began her career with the “everything is copy” philosophy informing it) before thinking he could actually walk away unscorched. For, as Ephron once said, “Writers are cannibals. They really are. They are predators.” And they will invariably attack if they feel attacked. Or, as Anne Lamott framed it for those crying “how could you?” when portrayed a certain way in writing, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
The result is often this unvarnished, “well, let me tell you what this asshole did to me” kind of writing. To the point where some have questioned if works like Allen’s are too much of an “overshare.” Which brings to mind a 1989 article about Ephron for Newsday with the headline, “She tells the world things that maybe she shouldn’t, but aren’t we glad she did?” The same can currently be said of Allen, who has unleashed a relationship discourse perhaps not seen since Sex and the City was on the air. Or perhaps not seen since Ephron’s own When Harry Met Sally. And it’s a discourse that seems to have many women coming out of the woodwork to admit that, well, no, they’re really not that enchanted by the prospect of nonmonogamy. A secret shame to admit considering how “evolved” they’re supposed to have become and how much they’re only supposed to see men as “things” to have fun with at this point.
As for those who still don’t believe the Ephron influence on and parallel to Allen, it was just recently, in her interview with Perfect magazine, that Alex Bilmes remarked, “There’s the famous Nora Ephron line…” Allen finishes it by answering, “‘Everything is copy,’ yup.” Yup indeed. For West End Girl continues to carry on that tradition (particularly when it comes to women telling their truths about men), an adage coined by none other than Ephron’s mother—credit where credit is due, after all.