"The Guardian" takes up the tale of the novellist and his ex-wife with "The Plaintiff" talking to Suzanne Goldenberg. Summers complains that "In those bitter days when their marriage was unravelling, she says, Carey took to referring to her as The Plaintiff in conversations and email with the couple's mutual friends. He also, she claims, spread stories that she was money-hungry. She says that to her horror, the gossip stuck, and among the literary set of Manhattan, where Summers and Carey have lived since 1990, she became something of a social pariah, shunned by several of her famous friends. As a result, Summers says, she has been forced to abandon hopes of getting a job in publishing."
This is starting to get a bit like a libel case where the aggrieved complains that their reputation has been sullied, only the general public either knows nothing about it or has forgotten the whole affair. The act of initiating a legal suit brings it back into the general consciousness and there it tends to stick.
Summers states again that she is writing a novel called Mrs Jekyll: "But she insists that the story is not modelled on her ex. 'I am not into revenge,' she says."
She sounds like she is running an advance publicity campaign for the book. She should have just written it, got it published and moved on. As we know, revenge is a dish best served cold.
