Is He Boyfriend Material?

Like every writer who ever wrote in the first person, I was piqued and a little mesmerized by Isabel Kaplan’s essay “My boyfriend, a writer, broke up with me because I’m a writer.”  Within an hour of it popping up in The Guardian on Monday, several friends and colleagues had sent it to me, all registering some variation of bitter if slightly amused recognition. Kaplan, a 32-year-old novelist and former film executive who published her second book last summer, channels her literary hero Nora Ephron to write about how her boyfriend, who she describes as a journalist and historian, ended their relationship over (as Ephron might have put it) irreconcilable literary differences.