Laird Harrison wonders why I told him to fuck off. I wonder what he thought I was going to say.

A couple of years ago, when he came around asking me for an interview about my parents’ group marriage, I refused for a reason.

This was our story — ours to forget or remember, ours to stew about on a red-eye at 40,000 feet, or to shove into the basement of oblivion. It was ours to paint with the gloss of nostalgia, or confess to a lover, or blurt over a seventh margarita, or expensively regurgitate to a therapist. It had nothing to do with Laird.

We have all moved on. I figured all the others in both families would turn him down as well. I figured wrong. Now in the way he has caricatured me, I guess he has had his revenge on the only person who showed him her door. So what is he looking for? A pat on the back?

At least he changed our names. At least he had the sense to call it fiction, because what he has Scotch-taped together out of half a dozen half-remembered anecdotes, self-justification and recrimination, bears no resemblance to the events of 40 years ago, as I remember them.

It’s pure bullshit.

So this is my advice. To Laird Harrison, pseudo-journalist, manipulator, false friend: get lost.

To the families involved: stop cooperating.

And to the reading public: don’t buy this book. Don’t patronize Laird Harrison. Let it die.