A Love Letter to All the Crazy Exes

Wounding/Wanting Diary #6

Hello dear ones,

For those who’re new here, this is my “Wounding/Wanting Diary” series for paid subscribers. If you can’t afford the $5/month for a paid subscription, you can email me at hello@margeauxfeldman.com. I never want money to be an access barrier, and I need to set some boundaries with this writing. Thank you for your understanding.

Because of the nature of what I’m writing about, I want to offer a content note here that will serve for all of this writing — and this piece in particular. In these entries, you will likely find details of sexual trauma, including rape, sexual assault, sex that occurred while drunk or high or both, intimate partner violence, and physical assault during sex. Please take care yourself after reading this writing.

Before we dive in, I just wanted to share that I’m publishing my first chapbook (basically a short book) called Poor Kid Trauma, and I’ve opened up presales to cover the printing costs. If you are one of the first 50 orders, you get a free coloring stick pack!!! I’m currently just 10 more copies away from my goal!!

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A Love Letter to All the Crazy Exes

“That psychotherapy’s not doing you much good is it? / You aren’t getting over him.” – Anne Carson, “The Glass Essay”

“I want you to know, that I am happy for you / I wish nothing but the best for you both,” so opens Alanis Morrisette’s infamous 1995 breakup anthem, “You Oughta Know.” It quickly becomes clear that Alanis is not, actually, all that happy, as she belts out in the chorus “And I'm here, to remind you / Of the mess you left when you went away / It's not fair, to deny me / Of the cross I bear that you gave to me / You, you, you oughta know.”

This song catapulted Alanis into fame, and quickly got her labeled as rageful, vengeful, and angry. As I watch Jagged, the documentary about Alanis’s life and career, we’re shown magazine covers and album reviews referring to Alanis as “hot and bothered,” whose “venom-laced anthems” make critics wonder: “Why is this young woman so darn mad?” Alanis’s most infamous cover was on RollingStone Magazine, with the words “Angry White Female” emblazoned beside her. 

Stephen Thomas Erlewine of AllMusic described “You Oughta Know” as “an emotional purging, prompted by a bitter relationship” and the album as a whole as “bitter diary entries [which] are given a pop gloss that gives them entry to the pop charts.” For Erlewine, as with so many other male music critics, Morrisette is a “sophomoric 19-year-old, once burned by love.” Please don’t get me started on the misogynistic argument that women writing about their feelings is nothing more than a diary entry, while men are lauded for bringing the personal into their writing. 

I find myself angered by the fact that Alanis had to defend herself and her post-breakup rage: “When I write really angry songs about someone, I’m not writing to get back at that person. I’m writing because it’s the only environment where I can get angry and not have it be destructive,” she explains in Jagged. “It’s just an expression, unjudged and uncensored. I was not writing to punish. I was writing to express, to get it out of my body because I didn’t want to get sick.” Alanis’s words resonate with me, as a human who writes non-fiction about their healing and their relationships. We’ve been told again and again to write from the scar, not from the wound, but I find something pathologizing about this injunction. 

I wonder what she would have said if she’d received a letter from that ex, requesting that she remove the song from her album and never write about him again. What if he’d told her that her representation of their relationship was so wildly different from his own that he was truly worried about her? Would she have noticed the gaslighting? The attempts at seeking control? At silencing her? I believe that this would only have stoked the flames of her anger.

I’d like to imagine her response: “Where was your concern when you fucked her?” she’d ask. “Can’t you see your misogyny is showing?” If she wrote another song about him, would he tell all of his friends that she was the one who harmed him? Would they sit around and diagnose her? I wish I could say no. But we all know that the answer is probably yes. No one likes it when a woman refuses to remain silent.

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The crazy ex. The hysterical woman. Unhinged and delusional. Watch out for them. I search for representations of them in media, and I return to many of my favorites from the late 90s and into the 2000s. 

Nancy from The Craft (1996): uses magic to transform her face into Sarah so that she can seduce Chris, the boy who slept with her and then told everyone she was a slut. Also doesn’t help that he tried to rape Sarah. When Sarah enters the room and Chris is seeing double, Nancy loses the illusion and starts to laugh. “He’s gotta pay,” she tells Sarah, refusing to leave. Things might’ve gone differently had Chris not told Nancy that “she was just jealous.” “Jealous? Why would I be jealous?? You don’t exist to me.” As Chris backs into the window, Nancy’s voice rises “The only way to treat women is by treating them like whores” As Nancy’s rage increases at Chris’s apology, she turns into the perfect representation of the crazy ex, shaking and flailing her head, repeating “He’s sorry. He’s sorry. He’s sorry,” until the window behind Chris opens and Nancy’s rage blows him right out. We watch Chris tumble out and hear his body hit the cement. By the end of the movie, Nancy is locked up in an asylum, thrashing in the white padded room, unable to move because she’s restrained to the bed.