“It All Happened Exactly As It Was Meant To."

Author Stephanie Danler on marriages, affairs, success & Sweetbitter.

If you believe that every piece of art has an origin story, this origin story, like the divorce, is inextricable from Sweetbitter; the affair is inextricable from the success of Sweetbitter and the success of my second marriage. It all happened exactly as it was meant to.

A natural-born storyteller, Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter and Stray, says it like it is and with great authority, pausing at all the right moments, emphasizing all the right words, and telling just enough (but not too much), always leaving you wanting more. In three acts, we journey with Stephanie through marriage, an affair, and divorce, followed by walking the Camino in search of forgiveness and writing a best-selling novel to the mother and wife she is today. An hour with her is so dynamic and engaging it’s like a day with anyone else. Find her Substack here.

Part One: Marriage 

"I moved to New York when I was 22 and almost immediately met the man who would become my first husband," Stephanie begins. "It was trial by fire," she notes of her past as a wild married person who never wanted to get married. "But, I don't regret any of it," she continued. "The good, the bad, and the tragic, because all of it got me to where I am today."

When Stephanie and I first connected, we did a quick 'who's who' and discovered we had a dear friend in common, making our meeting all the more fortuitous. Her perspective and life experiences felt achingly similar, so much so that after five minutes of chatting, I was convinced we must share a birthday or, at the very least, an astrological sign. As it turns out, I was right on the latter. She's a Sagittarius. Take what you will. There's some merit to that. 

With her blond hair, direct expression, deliberate assertions, and contemplative demeanor, Stephanie's words and the story she shared felt hauntingly familiar, from her upbringing with addict parents to several shared personal traits, like her love of time alone, past destructive behavior, and an uncanny ability to book same-day airfare (What's that you say? A last minute trip? Count me in!).  As she spoke, I wondered, “are these qualities we're born with or conditions of our origin? Further still, are they why we married young or allowed ourselves to be in toxic relationships and had to fight to become the humans we are today?” Perhaps. Either way, I knew I had to tell her story.

“I was 23 and madly in love,” Stephanie reflects. “We were restaurant people with a joint identity in the industry. For a long time we lived in this shared hospitality dream and saw our future going that way. But I never wanted to get married or have children, and I was very clear about that from the start.” 

"When he proposed, I worried," she recalls. "I'd just turned 26 and told myself it wouldn't change anything. Of course it did. Almost immediately. Not because marriage is so sacred or identity-defining, but because it changed his expectations of me." 

“After the proposal, I was consumed by anxiety and started seeing a therapist. It helped at first until a year and a half into the marriage, when what I feared would happen, happened. He began asking, ‘When are we having kids?’ ” Stephanie explained. “Never mind that I didn't want them." 

"When I turned 30 I wavered on the shared dream. We were about to open a wine store — a moment I'd been working towards my entire career — yet I was filled with terror and despair. I confided in my therapist that if I opened the wine store, I'd end up pregnant  and 40 and an alcoholic crying at a bar by myself about the book I never wrote!"

At the time, Stephanie had been mulling over an idea for a novel: an Anthony Bourdain-style, chef-driven narrative through the female lens. She used to say, “We've never seen a Henry James-style Portrait of a Lady-esque novel about the restaurant industry. Someone should write that.” I guess that someone was Stephanie, and the book was Sweetbitter, published 4 years later. 

Stephanie had come to New York to be a writer but found herself so entirely consumed by the restaurant industry that she stopped writing, though she hadn't lost the desire.

"On my therapist's advice, as the concept for Sweetbitter crystallized, I applied to graduate school without telling anyone (my business partners or husband). I figured it wasn't worth discussing unless I was accepted to a program. I had a lot of decisions to make about giving up my hospitality, food, and wine identity to get my MFA, take on debt, and spend two years writing a book — but I was making them alone."

"My husband was beside himself when I came to him with a fully baked plan — my acceptance letter, plus loans and scholarships secured. I see now how that must have felt as if I was plotting an entire life outside our marriage. Within six months of that conversation, our life imploded. It was torturous. I started an affair with an artist and reasoned he was feeding my creativity after years of intellectual and creative stagnation. There were several points where we could have repaired the union, but I was unwilling to budge on anything that felt as though it would hold me back from becoming the writer I was meant to be. Eventually, our therapist called it: the marriage was over.”

"I went to grad school, and my life fell apart. Suddenly, I was sleeping on couches and in a ton of debt. At no point did I think: this book would validate all my terrible choices and become a TV show or that I'd find another man and become a mother. Instead, I thought: I'm throwing away my one chance at having a real relationship, so I'd better figure out how to support myself. Over the next two years, while writing Sweetbitter, I cobbled together money working three jobs –  at a wine shop, as a research assistant to a professor, and waiting tables at Buvette.”

"That summer, I walked the Camino de Santiago, a trail dating back to medieval times that begins in France and ends in Santiago de Compostela. It's said that if you walk the Camino de Santiago, you're forgiven a mortal sin. Seeing as I'm a writer and like symbolism, I thought that if I walked for 43 days, I might forgive myself by the end."

"Suspicious of narratives like Wild and Eat, Pray, Love wherein the main character has a transcendental moment at the road's end, my hope for a radical transformation was low, but I was desperate and willing to try anything. As suspected, by the end of the Camino, I was exactly the same and still in a ton of pain and unable to forgive myself for what I did to my ex."

Having been there myself (in total despair, definitely not on the Camino), I knew the feeling. There have been times when I would have given anything to set off down a road that promised to absolve me of my wrongdoings, mistakes, bad decisions, and heartbreak. But healing doesn't work like that, at least not for me. Catharsis isn't finite. The process is ongoing. The work is ongoing.

"My greatest epiphany from the Camino is that there's no such thing as a happy ending, therefore I didn't want Sweetbitter to end with a bow or for her to ride off into the sunset. A moment of grace, yes. But not total redemption because that's unrelatable."

“After graduate school, I sold Sweetbitter. My agent called to congratulate me just as I walked into Buvette for my shift. Later that night, my editor came into the restaurant and hugged me. I fell into him and started sobbing…” Stephanie paused to catch her breath. “I was not going to be a waitress forever.” 

“Years later, when I was book-touring for Sweetbitter, people asked what it felt like to have my first book be a success. I’d say, ‘It feels a lot like failing.’ I can still feel what it felt like to be broke and living with nine roommates deep in Bushwick. I can still feel what it felt to have hurt a man I loved in a way that was almost inhumane. That’s what I think about when I think about Sweebitter’s success.”

“When I got my book advance, I traveled for a year. I had no lease in my name and no partner, and I was really good at booking plane tickets. I worked my last shift and left. I stayed with friends in Mexico City and Los Angeles and was in residency in the Catskills, New Hampshire, outside of Barcelona and Vermont. I wrote in European cafes during the day, that kind of thing. It was all very romantic, and freeing.”

Part Two: Sweetbitter 

"Except that I wasn't free. I had begun another affair with a married man. It was a desperate, heart wrenching affair. We were hungry for each other. Starving, in fact. The highs of illicit, erotically charged situations have been well cataloged. There's nothing like it; it's better than heroin, better than any pharmaceutical or skydiving adventure. It's better than anything really. Knowing we're not supposed to be together, but we have to be together. There is no better sex to be had anywhere."

"He promised to leave his wife. When I left for my residency in New Hampshire, I told him to take his time. What's the rush? We'd found each other. It was meant to be... yada yada," Stephanie paused. "Two years later, he still hadn't left and was never going to leave. I wasn't incapable of understanding how hard and painful it is to leave since I'd just left someone, but I also knew it was possible." 

I wondered, is it gendered? Obviously, a gross generalization, but more often than not, I’ve found that men don't like to be uncomfortable, make waves, or be at fault. Instead, they toe the line, dance around the edges, or drag their feet on issues that are too hard to face. They're happy as is until they’re forced to face the music. However, for most women, certainly not all, taking that leap outside of marriage into an affair means they’ve already left mentally; they’re good as gone. 

"Absolutely. By transgressing, as a woman, you've already upset the applecart so much that it's easier to imagine leaving. Whereas, for men, whether it's the way they compartmentalize or the way they relate to sex, I've seen it time and time again, and not just with him, but with friends, too, lots of men don't leave. They're very into their mistress or whatever you want to call that person until the moment of truth comes where they have to leave their comfortable life and they stay." 

"While traveling that year, I tried to break up with him. We'd go a month, maybe two months without talking, and then the reconciliation would be so intense it reaffirmed our love only to end in disaster, over and over again. Every time was more painful than the last."

"When I finally got to LA in December 2015, I'd been gone for a year. At that point, I felt I would die if I didn't break up with him. Both of my parents are addicts and even though he wasn't a drug, when it came to him, I was incapable of making good decisions. I worried I was going to end up just like them if I stayed in this toxic relationship. I called my friends and told them I was finally leaving. No one believed me, not even my sister."

Part Three: Meeting Him 

“I went cold turkey and kept myself as sedated as possible laying on the floor eating Xanax for four days while he texted and called. After a week, my gay husband and best friend, Eli, flew down from San Francisco unannounced and forced me to go to a concert. At first I refused, considering I’d been in a bathrobe for six days and very close to death but he wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

At that concert, she met Matt. And Matt’s girlfriend.

“He was cute and fun. But I felt I’d been ruined by this man and never be able to love another.”

“Two nights later, I saw Matt again. This time without the girlfriend. After a few drinks I worked up the nerve to ask him about the girlfriend given he seemed so available. He explained he was polyamorous and in an open relationship. Having just come out of a toxic affair, I was very dismissive and cynical about the whole thing, but didn’t really care that Matt had another partner as I was only looking to have fun.”

“After seeing each other for four weeks, I asked him to go to a party with me. When he wasn’t free, I completely shut down assuming he was with his girlfriend. I realize it’s entirely normal for people to be dating other people after only a few weeks but there was something about polyamory and the obsessive communication around it, and the idea that his girlfriend was his primary that was impossible for me. I could never again feel like the other woman.”

“We stopped seeing each other for a month and when we reconnected I told him I was unwilling to invest emotionally in someone, even a tiny bit, without at least the illusion of total exclusivity.”

In talking to Stephanie, I was reminded of something I read the other day: You get three loves in your life. Your first love often happens at a young age, and you may grow apart. Your second love is the hard one. You get hurt in this one. It teaches lessons and strengthens us. It includes pain, lies, betrayal, abuse, drama, and damage. But this is the one where you grow. The third love comes blindly and without warning. It creeps on you silently. You don’t go looking for this love; it comes to you. You thank the universe for this love. 

This was Matt. Her third love. Slow and steady. No fireworks, guessing, or games. No tears and screaming. Just honesty and kindness. 

"A month after we had that conversation, I left on a book tour and lived part time in New York. We were in love, but it wasn't desperate. It was considerate and communicative. Until then I believed that if you're not threatening to drive yourself off a freeway, is it even love? After the highest highs and darkness lows I'd experienced everything felt like a low level hum and I had to rewire my brain to fetishize kindness and openness over toxicity."

"Matt and I were long distance until I was 34 weeks pregnant. I was still married to my first husband, but legally separated. We finally divorced just after I had my son in 2018, moved to LA and was about to get remarried." 

"Now, ten years later, who would have thought? I'm married with two children. I have trouble identifying with the person I've become -- this seemingly stable mother in a loving, respectful marriage -- and am constantly reconciling. In many ways I still think I'm that person who doesn't deserve good things and should be suffering all the time. But what I've learned from my past disasters is this: This is who I am right now. Matt and I are great. We have our kids. We fight all the time about money and parenting, and who's driving the car in the relationship, same as every single person trying to make a life with another. It's not perfect and we're in couples therapy, but we're not mean to each other. We are happy. This is where we are right now. And it could all change again. I could have many, many lives. But, in this one, we're good and I'm gratified. We're doing all right, right now."

Applying a metaphor and gleaning inspiration comes easily. I say this often, and Stephanie echoed: regret is useless. All of our experiences create the story and get us to where we are; changing the past is impossible, but choosing differently in the future is. The big takeaway? You never know where life will take you; be grateful for the moment you are in

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