In Love and War

Have you read the June issue of Vogue yet? I don’t subscribe, but Cameron Diaz is on the cover this month shot by Mario Testino, so I couldn’t resist buying it. Well, inside there’s a very intriguing article called “Battles of the Heart” by Ana Menendez. The renowned Cuban author (Loving Che, In Cuba I Was A German Shepherd) opens up about the scandalous letter that ripped her marriage apart back in 2004. Or maybe it was already broken? In any case, while her husband, Dexter Filkins, was in Iraq covering the war for The New York Times, she was in Istanbul. She had given up her own journalism career because, admittedly, “a fiction career would better accommodate Dex’s increasingly peripatetic life.” One night, while hanging out with her family overlooking the Bosporus, she gets a letter saying, “Why can’t the a--hole keep his pants zipped?” As you can probably surmise, it was from Dexter’s side chick in Iraq. Thankfully, Ana filed for divorce from Dexter in 2005, shortly before their tenth wedding anniversary. Now she’s teaching at the American University in Cairo, Egypt, as a 2008–09 Fulbright Scholar.

Her ordeal was the basis for her second novel, The Last War, out now from HarperCollins. In Ana’s words, “The more I wrote, the more I learned about miscommunication, complicity and betrayal. … As the real details of my story gave way to the fictional demands of the novel, I understood that our marriage had been an attempt to write a heroic, outsize narrative for ourselves. As if the stuff of life were contained only in grand epics. But war without is nourished by the war within…”

A copy of The Last War is on its way to the Latina offices now. Can’t wait!