Bust magazine is planning to publish an article I wrote in their December/January issue, and I am so excited. Bust is one of my favourite magazines ever, so come on, pleeeease pick it up when it comes out. I'll be watching all of you that month just as Santa will be.
Since we heard so much about men cheating on their wives this year, the article is a list of the top ten adulteresses of all time. It's getting edits right now; Bust wanted only super-strong, positive women in there, of which I had eight. The two cuts were a pair of sad sacks and a crazy astronaut, and I'm sharing those entries with you below because the main reason I am proud of the article is the space puns. I really went the extra parsec on those.
The edits I got were really good, and this article will now have two new fantastic and fascinating women in addition to the eight that were already hanging out in it. But please say a prayer for my now killed darlings, who were not tough enough to hang around the in-crowd:
Anna Karenina/Madame Bovary: Anna and Emma are conflated here because it’s the same basic story: if you’re married to a nice guy but you have a taste for bad boys, you’re probably going to end up under a train or filled with arsenic. Or at least you will if you’re created by a 19th century moralizing male novelist. Most of the women on this list own their infidelities, but these two let their infidelities own them. I hate to say it, but if you’re going to model yourself after a fictional adulteress, you would do better to be a ditzy, amoral farthead like Daisy Buchanan than either of these two sad sacks. At least then you’re not the one dead by your own hand at the end – your lover is. Much happier ending, right? F. Scott Fitzgerald = Pollyanna.
Lisa Nowak: Astronauts have to endure an insanely rigorous training program in order to become indestructible physically and mentally. Yet NASA somehow neglected to prepare their astronauts for the toughest challenge of all: a broken heart. In 2007, Captain Nowak, an astronaut and flight engineer married to fellow NASA employee Richard Nowak, embarked on a solo mission with the objective of attacking and kidnapping Captain Colleen Shipman, the new girlfriend of her ex-lover Commander William Oefelein. She just wasn’t sensing that same buzz (Aldrin) with Oefelein so she really had no choice but to get (Neil) armstrong with his new girl. Oh yeah, she was also wearing diapers and was armed with a BB gun, pepper spray, rubber tubing, a 2-pound drilling hammer and a 8-inch folding knife, so it’s clear that she was seriously moonstruck. The silver astro-lining? It’s a fair bet that men actually are from Mars, given how desperately Nowak has always wanted to go there.
