About West End Girl Lily Allen by Jean Garnett

“Who is Madeline?” my daughter asked. We had been singing Lily Allen’s new song all morning—“Da da da da da da da da who is Madeline?”; we can’t forget it. How should I answer it? Madeline seems to be the woman who cheated on the singer’s husband? Then I have to explain what infidelity is. And wait, “cheating” isn’t the right word, as Allen and her husband have an open marriage, even though the song tells us that he “broke the rules” of their arrangement with Madeline… Anyway I’m not going to try to explain nonmonogamy to a seven year old.

In a stroke of genius, I found the correct answer: “I don’t know.” My daughter didn’t seem to need any further clarification on this issue, but I actually realized that I needed it. That is, I wanted to understand why for some reason, despite Allen’s deft and hilarious sketching of this Madeline person as a vapid, woo-woo homewrecker, I felt a certain sympathy for her. I care about Madeline, about her desires and her right to pursue them without being evil.

West End GirlsLily Allen’s first album in seven years, is a pop marital memoir chronicling the breakdown of Allen’s partnership with actor David Harbor following their agreement to try nonmonogamy. I understand why people are fascinated by this record. There’s a certain satisfaction in seeing a romantically scarred, no-longer-young female artist explode back into the spotlight with a series of sexy, delicious hits: we love it for her. There are Allen’s indelible songs that make my kids hum them while brushing their teeth, the charm and humor of his lyrics, and the generosity of his voice, that make us believe like a friend: we love him for that. He’s a lot of fun.

Does that mean her husband, and his “Madeline” should be hated? Because, whether Allen meant it or not, that seems to be the conclusion here. West End Girls has been favorably described as a revenge album, and the consensus among fans seems to be that Allen genuinely loves Harbor, that in the process of turning his pain into art, he has given him the humiliation he so richly deserves. Remind me why he deserved this? From the lyrics it sounds like there was dishonesty on his part, but the real sin, in the story of Allen’s recording, was that he openly married her.

The idea of ​​marriage immediately opened up as a thing to do by man to woman rings the bell. In 2022, after I published an essay on this website about opening up to my own marriage, many commenters expressed anger at my husband’s disregard for my ability to agree to my own terms of life. “I can’t get over my anger,” wrote one reader, “… [that] her asshole husband decides he needs a new pussy. Fuck that guy.” Many called him a bad father simply because he was an openly married man (actually he was a devoted father and did more than half of the childcare at that point). Although my essay was, I thought, a celebration of the possibilities that nonmonogamy opened up to me—as a mother, as a writer, as a sexual being—a great many readers were determined to understand it as a story about domestication’s power to destroy the male sex drive. These people seem to understand nonmonogamy as a male prerogative that is essentially coercive and in conflict with the female prerogative, motherhood, and “family values” of monogamy.

I don’t mean to belittle West End Girls wondering if his popularity is underpinned by his adherence to this archetype. Whatever it is (often fun, well made), West End Girls I thought it was a rather neat, crowd-pleasing presentation of nonmonogamy, and confirmed the bias that casts the extramarital male libido as the bad guy and Allen as the victim who just wants to be allowed to go about the business of being a good wife. On the night of the reveal of “Madeline,” in the song “Tennis,” Allen “got dinner on the table”; she made her husband’s favorite food. In the previous song, we only hear her side of a telephone conversation in which her husband seems to be asking for an open arrangement, and the snippet of dialogue suggests that this highly expressive woman lacks the voice, will, and choice to reject her husband’s proposal. We can hear him holding back tears as he says, “I want you to be happy.”

What is missing or revealed in this presentation? Earlier this year, I published another essay about leaving my open marriage to pursue an unavailable man I desperately wanted, emotionally, spiritually, physically. “You idiot, kill yourself,” a stranger wrote to me. Sick horny slut corrupted uggo inhibits degenerate old maid slut slut those are some of the names that were called to me. (Also “chopped shit”, a strange nickname that, as it were, a pile of shit doesn’t get worse by chopping it up. Isn’t that right?) Hundreds of male readers expressed anger and disgust that I dared to want a man who wasn’t my husband, when, as a mother over forty, I was clearly not wanted by them. A female “reporter” for New York Post described me carefully, “it’s 10 o’clock PM do you know where your children are?” gravity as “a woman who has decided to embrace open relationships, casual sex, and situations well into middle age.”

Is it possible that we should not consider open direct marriage to be a husband’s imposition on a passive wife, partly because we, as a culture, still threatened by a mother’s extramarital desires? Is it possible that the double standard of female aging outlined by Susan Sontag in 1972 does not need to be revised half a century later? Men are thought to continue to desire forever, whereas for women, “the moment at which they begin to be disqualified as sexually attractive is when they are sexually mature.” Are we so uncomfortable with the strength and vividness of middle-aged women’s libido that we refuse to consider open marriage as potentially providing freedom for wives?

This past week, a newspaper editor contacted me and asked if I would be willing to take part in this lively conversation West End Girls by spouting thousands of words about “why open marriages don’t work.” I don’t care; I don’t see open marriage as an unworkable model—certainly no more so than monogamous marriage. Inviting another lover into a marriage is like bringing a child into it: both openings reveal latent conflicts in a relationship, and many marriages will crumble under the pressure of nonmonogamy just as they do under the pressure of having small children. In my own case, an open marriage “worked,” because my marriage had to end. Sometimes destruction is precisely the work that needs to be done.

I’d like to hear his version West End Girls where a wife not only wholeheartedly agrees and takes part in the openness, but also sings her heart out as she faces the consequences of her own desires. Because there are always consequences; that’s what we open up to when we open up a marriage, and there are no terms, no “rules” that can completely isolate us from those things. Perhaps some of our discomfort with nonmonogamy is tied to the teaching that a “good” romance is a safe romance, and that we deserve and owe each other emotional security. We do not; We know this in our hearts, and in fact, one of the appeals of open marriage, and part of its great potential, lies precisely in how it makes us less safe. Pursuing passion is a dangerous and fragile business; as Roy Orbison sang, love hurts. We can be grateful for this. Where would we be as a species without the mind-altering pain caused by reckless passion and tenderness, sex and betrayal, the way they dismantle and force us to rebuild more honestly? What would our art be, what would our music be, if love were safe?

I’m currently listening to a song my ex-husband sent me a few weeks ago, “Au Pays du Camine,” by the band Geese. The song’s lyrics were written by the band’s frontman, Cameron Winter, whose mother, Molly Roden Winter, wrote it Againa best-selling memoir about an open marriage that drew a lot of criticism, not only for its author’s privilege (some argue that openness is a luxury, and of course Allen could be an example there) but also for alleging that she was unwittingly entered into by her husband in an open marriage. “You can change,” Winter shouted in his sick bass, “baby you can change and still choose me… you can be free, just go home, please.” This is one of the most elegant forms of chaos I have ever heard of in human longing—a chaos that is eternally unrevisable, a competition between the drive for safety and freedom, for choice and the self-determining capacity for change, which at any moment can oppose choice. Of course, I know nothing about this young man’s personal life, but listening to this song, I found myself speculating about how his parents’ transparent attitude toward the mess might have affected him. (Am I being presumptuous? Well then, I’m being presumptuous; that’s the fun of speculation.) It all got me thinking: open marriages don’t have to preserve “good” marriages or dissolve “bad” marriages to be “successful.” That might help produce some good songs. And maybe bring us closer together? Not necessarily as a couple, but as a community that struggles endlessly to face what feels impossible in terms of intimacy, what we repress, what we relegate to fantasy, what drives us crazy, what hurts.

Allen’s new music is steeped in heartache, and I can’t help but feel remotely happy for him as his safety measures fail. One stipulation—that her husband’s infidelity must be related to sex work (“there has to be payment,” Allen sings in “Madeline”)—suggests, to me, a somewhat inhumane idea of ​​sex workers being somehow barred from human interaction, rendering their partner’s indiscretions “safe,” all business, not personal. But his personal desires came out; it comes to mind in that name, “Madeline,” the specific reality of which, at first, Allen cannot “process.” However, he processed it, and implemented it. For me, it’s the inclusion of the deeply personal into his music—rough, meat-and-potatoes diarism like “dinner on the table, tell the kids it’s time to eat” and “Duane Reade bag with the handle tied” and “I wrote a little email”—that brings these airy, catchy songs into an experience.

I don’t know what Madeline experienced. “Who is Madeline?” Whoever he is, I hope he’s out there getting his.

Jean Garnett has published essays in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Paris Review Daily, And Yale Review. A Pushcart Prize winner, she is working on a book about relationships.