Author shares jaw-dropping details of how she almost destroyed her marriage because of her booze habit and yoga retreat affair - and fury at husband for writing book with VERY gory description of her labor

An accomplished advice columnist has offered jaw-dropping details surrounding her recent near-divorce.

Emily Gould, 42, penned The Lure of Divorce this past Valentine's Day, nearly a year-and-a-half removed from her since called-off split to 49-year-old Keith Gessen.

At the time, in the autumn of 2022, publications like Page Six reported on the announcement - and how Gould, a novelist, blogger, and former Gawker editor, asked her readers to crowdfund the separation.

It appeared to be the end of a storybook union for the Brownstone power couple, celebrated by Vanity Fair as a pair marked by 'precocious literary success combined with sex appeal and self-regard' - Gessen himself is an accomplished novelist.

That is, until a year later, when Gould came forward to tell onlookers the divorce had been called off, and that the pair were back to wedded bliss.

Her piece for  The Cut offers insight into what happened behind the scenes, and how she almost destroyed her marriage because of her boozing and an affair, and secretly raged at Gessen for publishing details about her labor.

Emily Gould, 42, penned The Lure of Divorce this past Valentine's Day, nearly a year-and-a-half removed from her since-called off split to 49-year-old Keith Gessen

At the time, in the autumn of 2022, publications like Page Six reported on the announcement - and how Gould, a novelist, blogger, and former Gawker editor, asked her readers to crowdfund the separation

'In the summer of 2022, I lost my mind,' the 5,550 word piece, offered in the form of a first-person feature, begins.

'At first, it seemed I was simply overwhelmed because life had become very difficult,' Gould continues, 'and I needed to - had every right to - blow off some steam.'

She goes on to write how her family-of-four, at the time, was set to loose their Brooklyn apartment and had to find another one 'fast, in a rental market gone so wild that people were offering over the asking price on rent.'

She adds that her husband, Keith, was preparing to publish his third book, Raising Raffi, about raising their eldest - 'a book he’d written with [her] support and permission but that, as publication loomed, I began to have mixed feelings about.

'To cope with the stress,' the author of the Cut's Going Through It column writes, 'I asked my psychiatrist to increase the dosage of the antidepressant I’d been on for years.

'Sometime around then, I started talking too fast and drinking a lot.'

Gould eventually reveals that she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, but first writes that drinking proved self-medicating to her then-known depression.

'I felt invincibly alive, powerful, and self-assured,' she recalls - 'troubled only by impatience with how slowly everyone around me was moving and thinking .'

It appeared to be the end of a storybook union for the Brownstone power couple - celebrated by Vanity Fair as a pair marked by 'precocious literary success combined with sex appeal and self-regard'. Gessen himself is an accomplished novelist

The piece then describes Gould's descent into hard, daily drinking - during which she'd have 'drinks with breakfast, lunch, and dinner.'

She jokes at a point: 'Who doesn’t have an Aperol spritz on the way home from the gym in the morning?'

The drinking, however, quickly drained the couple's finances, she admits - as did additional spending from funds 'we didn’t really have' on 'ill-fitting lingerie' and workout clothes and planters from eCommerce site Etsy.

She then grew distant and impatient with her husband, even as the launch date for his first-person memoir Raising Raffi: The First Five Years rapidly approached.

At a party in his honor she helped organize, attendees contracted COVID after she inexplicably 'handed out cigarettes from a giant salad bowl'.

She admits 'I had gone from smoking once or twice a day to chain-smoking whenever I could get away with it.'

When friends afterwards pointed out the foolishness of her antics, Gould writes that she 'screamed at them and pointed out everything that was wrong in their lives.'

'And most crucially,' she adds, 'I became convinced that my marriage was over and had been over for years.'

That is, until a year later, when Gould came forward to tell onlookers the divorce had been called off, and that the pair were back to wedded bliss. Her piece for The Cut offers insight into what happened behind the scenes, and how she almost destroyed her marriage because of her boozing and an affair, and secretly raged at Gessen for publishing details about her labor

Growing increasingly confrontational with her husband, she 'built a case against [him] in [her] mind,' she continues.

She recalls felling how the assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism's upcoming book 'was simply the culmination of a pattern... [of him putting] put his career before mine.'

She writes: 'While I had tended to our children during the pandemic, he had written a book about parenting.

Stressed by the work of her own career and raising her kids - which she claims was mostly her responsibility since Keith had a full-time job teaching journalism at Columbia - she grew increasingly unstable, spending money 'like it was water,' and 'leaving Keith to make sure we made rent every month.'

'Every few months, we’d have a fight about this and I’d vow to change,' she writes.

'[S]ome system would be put in place, but it never stuck. We were headed for disaster, and finally it came.'

She goes on to describe a blow-up between the two following a friend's wedding upstate, where she'd been drinking - first from spiked lemonade she secured 'at lunch alone', followed by boxed wine at the reception.

There, she writes, 'I couldn’t eat any of the food - it all contained wheat, and I have celiac disease.'

The couple would then get into it after arriving at the home where they were staying, where Gould writes she 'ordered takeout and demanded [her husband] go pick it up for [her].'

Gessen’s third novel, “Raising Raffi: The First Five Years,” was about parenting the pair's first son, but angered Gould due to a graphic passage about her birthing the now school-aged boy

Her spouse - an accomplished Russian translator and the co-founder and co-editor of American literary magazine n+1 - obliged, but would eventually call from the restaurant 'incensed,' Gould remembers, before revealing how the purchase was nearly the straw that broke the pair's joint bank account.

'Did I know how much my takeout order had cost?' she recalled Gellis asking her, admitting that she 'hadn’t paid attention as I checked boxes in the app, nor had I realized that our bank account was perilously low.

'I never looked at receipts or opened statements,' she says

'Not knowing this, I felt like he was actually denying me food, basic sustenance... [so] I packed a bag as the kids played happily with their cousins downstairs, then waited by the side of the road for a friend who lived nearby to come pick me up.'

Set on leaving her husband over the tiff, she recalls Gellis standing there at the side of the road 'begging me to stay.

'But his words washed over me,' she insists. 'I was made of stone. I said it was over — really over. This was it, the definitive moment I’d been waiting for. I had a concrete reason to leave.'

She then describes a Zoom call with her therapist while still upstate, during which the mental health expert advised her to commit herself into a psychiatric hospital.

A friend proceeded to pick her up to drive her back to the city, where she voluntarily committed herself to the psychiatric section of NYU Langone.

There, they started Gould on a daily dose of lithium, and after a a meeting with a team of doctors, they determined she had bipolar disorder, she recalls.

'They gave me a nicotine patch every few hours plus Klonopin and Seroquel and lithium.'

She writes how the opening chapter of the book described her giving birth in-depth, and how she didn’t realize how violated until a New Yorker’s fact-checker perused the piece, and called her to ask about a section that described blood discharging from the journalist's vagina

She goes on to reveal how the message she sent to newsletter readers in October 2022 asking for $20,000 to fund her divorce was actually sent from her psychiatric hold, as she worried that her hospitalizations would hamper a prospective custody battle.

She recalls how since she wasn't  being held involuntarily, she could write letters to NYU psychiatrists on why she should be released.

These letters, she recalled, centered around that she was divorcing her husband, and was thus scared she would not be able to see my kids again if declared insane. 

'These letters did not result in my release; if anything, they prolonged my stay,' she admits.

At some point in her nearly monthlong stay, doctors elected to briefly return her phone, which would soon be revoked again.

'But in that brief interim,' Gould recalls, she sent out the newsletter to her hundreds of subscribers declaring she was getting a divorce, asking them to Venmo money to fund the future custody battle.

Meanwhile, during meetings with shrinks, she continued to maintain that she was sane, and that her main issue was her deteriorating marriage.

She put her husband on a no-visit list, but continued to eat the gluten-free egg sandwiches he religiously brought her every morning becuase she did not care for the hospital's food menu.

Eventually, after a daily cocktail of med consisting of lithium, gabapentin, and more, Gould was cleared for release, and returned home to live with her husband and two young sons.

In the piece, Gould recalls an affair she had with an unnamed man in the few weeks between the couple's blowup over the food delivery and her hospitalization. The pair have since reconciled, with Gessen forgiving her

The two began to sleep separately, with Gould claiming a downstairs room for herself and coming into contact with Gessen only when parenting called for it.

Still set on getting divorced - a state of mind she obliquely blamed on 'strong antipsychotic medication' - she attempted to feign normality as her husband continued with most of the pair's daily duties.

During this time, Gould attended AA meetings required by the hospital outpatient program, all while feeling secret bouts of resentment - and sympathy - for her spouse, who was suffering from the sudden shift in their dynamic.

Friends, meanwhile, urged the pair to reconcile - but Gould remained steadfast in her decision, recalling how one passage in Raising Raffi rubbed her the wrong way.

That passage, centered around her birthing eldest son Raffi while her husband looked on, was revealed to her six months before the book was published in June 2022, and about ten months before her hospitalization and bipolar diagnosis.

'I had, at that time, enjoyed reading it,' she admits of the tell-all about her husband's initial experiences with parenting, before conceding: 'But as publication drew nearer, the pang turned into outright anger.'

She writes how the opening chapter of the book described her giving birth in-depth, and how she didn’t realize how violated until a New Yorker’s fact-checker perused the piece, and called her to ask about a section that described blood discharging from the journalist's vagina.

She recalls hanging up on the fact-checker after being asked, telling her to please contact her husband instead. At this point, she notes that Gessen had read this current essay, and only 'suggested minimal changes.'

The doting dad eventually agreed to enter divorce mediation in December 2022, during which, Gould writes, 'the one who talked the most [was me], blaming Keith for making me go crazy.

At this point, Gould recalls an affair she had with an unnamed man in the few weeks between the couple's blowup over the food delivery and her hospitalization. 

The tryst, which Gould in her piece attempts to justify, happened had a yoga retreat.

'I had been so sure we were basically already divorced that I justified the act to myself; I couldn’t have done it any other way,' she writes.

'I had thought I might panic at the last minute or even throw up or faint, but I had gone through with it thanks to the delusional state I was in.

'There aren’t many more details anyone needs to know. It was just one time, and it was like a drug I used to keep myself from feeling sad about what was really happening. 

'Anyway, there’s a yoga retreat center I’ll never be able to go to again in my life.'

Eventually, after the mediation meeting, the couple decided to coninue seeing a therapist, but in couples therapy instead of divorce mediation. 

During these meetings, Gessen would forgive Gould 'for cheating and wasting our money,' the writer recalls. He also forgave her for, in Gould's word's, 'for having a mental breakdown, leaving him to take care of our family on his own for a month, costing [them] thousands of uninsured dollars in hospital bills.

She then conceded that she too had 'to forgive him for treading on my literary territory: our family’s life, my own life', and 'for taking for granted that there would always be dinner on the table without his having to think about how it got there.'

The couple within days would reconcile, calling off the divorce that month. Publications would report on the aborted split several months later, in October of 2023

In addition to being founder of magazine n+1, Gessen is also a translator, and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

He has written three books, including the memoir 'And the Heart Says Whatever' and the novel 'Friendship.'