The End of Romance: A Guest Post by Lily Meyer

When her marriage ends, “no strings attached” becomes Sylvie’s motto, but her cynical rebellion turns into a tender love story when two men enter her life. Read on for an exclusive essay from Lily Meyer on writing The End of Romance.

The End of Romance is a loose, gender-inverted reimagining of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Enemies, A Love Story, which I picked out of a Little Free Library in 2019 and became so obsessed with that I felt compelled to rewrite it. Enemies is a tragicomedy about Herman Broder, a Holocaust survivor living in New York. His wife, Yadwiga, is a Polish Catholic who Herman married after she and her family sheltered him from the Nazis. After emigrating, though, he realizes that Yadwiga is not exactly his soul mate, and launches into an affair with a woman named Masha, who is. Masha, who is a lapsed-ish Orthodox Jew, badly wants Herman to leave Yadwiga, marry her, and have kids, but before Herman can save enough money to do so, his first wife, Tamara—who he thought was dead—appears in New York.

Singer plays this situation for laughs, but not only. Herman has real emotional and financial obligations to all three women, and he is woefully unequipped to deliver, or to decide between them. He has significant survivor’s guilt and trauma; he is, essentially, a fatalist who believes that the Holocaust ended history. It’s no surprise, then, that Enemies ends unhappily. I won’t ruin it for you, but I will say that it’s a whole lot bleaker than The End of Romance. But both Singer’s book and mine are highly idea-driven novels whose main characters overcomplicate their romantic lives because they believe history is over. It’s just that Sylvie Broder, my protagonist (who is indeed named for Herman Broder), thinks the history of romance is over, not all of history.

I’m not the only person who’s adapted Enemies. In 1989, Paul Mazursky made it into a movie starring Anjelica Huston, Lena Olin, and Margaret Sophie Stein. It was nominated for three Oscars and made all the big papers’ and magazines’ year-end lists, which I know because I have a gigantic poster of it hanging directly behind the desk where I wrote The End of Romance. While I was working, I turned to it—literally and figuratively—all the time. (If anyone from Hollywood is reading, my greatest fantasy is of Anjelica Huston playing Sylvie’s friend and spirit guide Elaine.)

Sarah Schulman, the author, playwright, and activist, has adapted Enemies, too. She wrote a stage version that premiered in 2007, and in the introduction to her exceptional book Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, she writes that she was inspired by Singer’s refusal to sentimentalize his protagonist Herman, a cheater and asshole who tries to have three wives at once. Herman was “complex and conflicted before the Holocaust,” Schulman points out, and his “fragile personhood, [his] contradictions, did not have to be scrubbed clean” to make his survival meaningful. Schulman brings this perspective to her consideration of the AIDS crisis, and I tried to bring it to my consideration of the abuse that sets Sylvie on her emotional and philosophical journey toward the end of romance.

Of course, Enemies and Let the Record Show aren’t the only two books that inspired The End of Romance. Far from it. I couldn’t have written this book without Katherine Angel’s Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again, Laurie Colwin’s Family Happiness,  Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Marriage Plot, Lily King’s Writers & Lovers, or Norman Rush’s Mating. I hope you’ll read them all, and I hope you’ll read and love The End of Romance.