665: Before Things Went to Hell

Ira Glass

At one level, my Grandma Frieda's college records are utterly ordinary-- don't tell much of a story. She's a good student, and teachers say the nice things that they say about bright students. They talk about her sense of social responsibility. They talk about her, quote, excellent and well-trained mind. This is 1931, that they would say such a thing. Goucher College, then an all girls' school in Baltimore.

I got these records a few years back when I was invited to give a commencement address at Goucher. I asked if I could get a copy of her school records. And there's such a different picture of this person I knew. It's my grandma as a college kid. Grandma Frieda was training to be a teacher, and her evaluations say that she has a lot of promise.

Quote, "She did her practice teaching with great success, making unusually varied, interesting, and well organized lesson plans, presenting her material with force and vigor, showing great accuracy in all details." I like that one. "She has a forceful as well as a very pleasant personality," which I can say is true. She is very smart, always let you know what she thought.

There's four of these evaluations. They list her traits. There's like a checklist with some energy, reliability, perseverance, resourcefulness. She's 21 years old, poised on the verge of a great future, which is what is so hard about reading these things today. It's a future she never got to live.

Ira Glass

Those are two kids, my dad and my uncle, Barry and Lenny, now in their 80s. I asked them to read through this stuff and talk to me about it. And there were so many things that stopped her from realizing her potential. After she graduated, Frieda taught junior high school for a year and then she married and very quickly, like amazingly quickly, her marriage fell apart.

By her late 20s, she was a single mom with two kids. This is back in the 1930s. This is during the depression. And to help support her whole extended family, she apparently got drafted to work in the family business, which was this little corner grocery store in downtown Baltimore where they lived.

Ira Glass

Frieda's parents and other relatives lived above and next door to the store. It was run by Frieda's dad, Isidore. He was kind of a soft touch and would lose a lot of money by extending credit to customers who'd never pay it back. I'm named for Isidore. I have his Hebrew name, Yitzchak.

They didn't name me Isidore because they realized at some point that Isidore Glass is a parsable sentence in English, is a door glass. Also, I was told years ago by my mom that they wanted a name that was less Jew-y. The fact that with that mission they ended up at Ira just shows how little the whole family knew about the world of non-Jews at the time.

Anyway, Frieda's college file also includes all the alumni questionnaires that she sent into Goucher in the decades after she graduated. And in those, in the formal language of somebody filling out a form, she describes first helping in the store in the 1930s-- doing the books, waiting on customers, bringing her kids to help work-- and then finally taking the store over when her dad got sick in 1950, trying to keep the store afloat as it slowly went bankrupt. There was another thing that shaped her life in ways that nobody could foresee back when she was 21, getting those glowing evaluations from her teachers.

Ira Glass

Actually, I know that story well. When she was a teenager, Frieda got acne. And the doctor treated it-- this is the early 1920s-- with this new miracle treatment, x-rays. He bombarded her face with x-rays. Nobody would do this today, because we now understand that gives you cancer, and that's exactly what it did to her.

She got skin cancer when she was 32, which back then, doctors had a hard time treating. Uncle Lenny, I should say, as a doctor who was also her kid, remembers chapter and verse of all the operations and procedures and what went wrong and how it would recur. And it just, it slowly took over most of her face and her nose.

Ira Glass

In the time I knew her, Grandma Frieda's face was made of these pale white rectangular sheets of grafted flesh sewn together around an easy to imagine skull. Her nose was a misshapen bulb that was somewhere between human nose and pig nose. But of course, you know, the family that you're born into is the very definition of what seems normal.

And my sisters and cousins and I-- like, she made Jell-O for us, you know? She played Scrabble. Like, we loved her. We didn't think anything of it.

In the late '50s, finally, after her father died and the corner store went broke at last, Frieda did get to teach again full time. It was a quarter century after she graduated from Goucher. She taught high school French. Apparently the first day of class she would always tell the students to take a good long stare at her face right now, just get it out of their systems.

Grandma Frieda's years at Goucher college, she would bring them up a lot. She wore her Phi Beta Kappa honor society key from Goucher, and then she would explain to strangers what it was. At holiday dinners, if one of us brought somebody new around, she would work Goucher into the conversation. But also, I swear, I remember her bringing it up with cashiers at the grocery store on Green Spring Avenue, and with nurses in the hospital, which I know makes her sound like a crank or something, though really she was not.

Ira Glass

There's a page in her Goucher file that I guess was filled out when she first entered the school, typed on an old manual typewriter. It lists her name, her childhood address, her age-- which is 17. 17. I've stared at that number for a long while. Like, OK, when this was written down, that number was accurate.

She was 17. And honestly, like, I'd never pictured her at 17 before this. A kid with pretty skin-- the acne treatment apparently worked like a charm-- looking forward to so many things. I knew her in her last 20 years. But her first 20, I don't know, it was comforting to think that she got those too.

That that was just as real a part of her life as the part that I knew. I think it's easy to decide that what's happening like, right now, right this second, is the most important thing. But in fact, the moments before are just as real as the moments right now. And it all looks so much more complicated if you take them into account.

Well, today on our show we have stories like the moment that's documented in my Grandma Frieda's college file, the moment before things went to hell. We have two very different stories. In one, politicians nearly solved something that today is so deeply unsolved that we have shut down our government over it. In the other, post divorce time travels for 90 minutes into pre-divorce. WBEZ Chicago, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act One, Where Have You Gone, Barbara Jordan? Our Nation Turns Its Lonely Eyes to You. OK, so government gets shut down over a border wall. President says there's a national emergency. Democrats say there isn't one.

But there is a moment before all this, before this whole conversation went into the divisive, nobody is listening to anybody hell that it seems to be in today. There was a moment back in the '90s when Congress had a bunch of people with completely opposing points of view on this sit down, hash it out, and come up with a solution to the whole thing. And they came up with one, a comprehensive one that would have fixed so many of the things that we're arguing about today. We wouldn't even be talking about this today this way. All of this would've played out differently.

And at the center of the whole thing was this one woman-- charismatic, principled, beloved by Democrats and Republicans, and so different from anybody we can think of in politics today. Her whole mission and philosophy of politics was so different from anything you see today. One of our producers, Miki Meek, like me and a few others here on our staff has become kind of obsessed with immigration these last few years. She has the story. And we start with a little context.

Miki Meek

In the 90s when all this happens, immigration hadn't become this nationally charged partisan issue. It was a topic that made most people's eyes glaze over. Most of the country didn't even know that a historic migration from Mexico to the US was underway. That is, unless you live in a state like Florida, Texas, or California where most of the undocumented immigrants were settling. In those states, voters were getting angry.

So the politics of immigration started to change. And the big bang that really launched everyone into this new world happened in California in 1994-- a ballot measure called Prop 187.

Miki Meek

Prop 187 banned undocumented immigrants and their kids from getting public benefits or going to schools, and made teachers and doctors turn over the names of anyone they knew or even suspected was undocumented. Huge parts of it were unconstitutional. The Californians voted for it by an overwhelming margin. For Democrats in the state, this was a wake up call.

And one of the things that's so interesting when you listen back to all this stuff now is that they do not sound like the Democrats today. For instance, here's Senator Diane Feinstein from California. She was against the harsh restrictions of Prop 187, but at the same time she wanted to crack down on illegal immigration and she called for it on the Senate floor.

Miki Meek

This is her in the mid '90s, and this next thing she says is eerily prophetic.

Miki Meek

You can almost picture her putting her hands up at the border of California, trying to prevent xenophobia from spreading. These were very different times and both sides moved quickly to figure out a solution. So Congress put together a team, a blue ribbon commission, to come up with proposals that Congress could turn into laws. I know how boring this sounds. Commissions are the joke of government, the place politicians send issues to die-- bureaucratic, ineffective.

But I promise, the story I'm going to tell you is not that. For starters, they packed this commission with people who are so different from each other that it's almost comical. On one side there was the guy who co-wrote Prop 187 and on the other side, a Democrat who helped almost three million undocumented immigrants get amnesty here. I spoke with all the commission members who are still alive. There's five of them.

Miki Meek

This is Michael Teitelbaum, a demographer that Republicans appointed.

Miki Meek

That's where this remarkable woman came in, the hero of our story. Her name was Barbara Jordan, and she was a civil rights icon, a democratic representative from Texas who also incidentally was black and gay. She's been dead for more than 20 years now. And to understand the unique spot she held in American politics, some background.

She grew up in Houston, went to segregated schools and then law school. Started running for office in her 20s and broke a bunch of barriers. In the '60s she became the first black woman elected to the Texas legislature. And then in 1972, the first to serve in the US Congress from the south. She became this breakout national star during the Watergate hearings in 1974.

At the time, she was just a 30 something newcomer on the House Judiciary Committee that was deciding whether or not they were really going to impeach the President of the United States. And it's pretty much what you'd expect, a bunch of older white men on live TV sounding like your typical politician, giving their opening statements.

Until it came time for Jordan, who wore this big boxy orange suit, bright camera lights glaring off her black rimmed glasses-- a freshman Congresswoman, and at that point one of four black woman ever to serve in Congress. And when she opened her mouth, she spoke in this style that was grand, but also personal.

Miki Meek

When I first heard this, I put it on repeat. I love how she sounds. Even then, her voice was considered unusual, like JFK or Churchill, with maybe a little Katherine Hepburn thrown in there, which turns out is just how she spoke, whether she was on a stage or not. And at that moment during Watergate, millions of Americans heard her for the very first time and lots of them were like, wow, who is this woman talking this way?

Miki Meek

She explained, the president is not above the law. He is not above the Constitution. It was a galvanizing moment. People remarked how fair minded and serious she was. Dan Rather, who covered the Watergate hearings, said later that when Jordan finished there was no doubt in his mind that the president would be impeached or have to resign. He said she created this feeling of, as hard as it seems we have to go on with this. We don't have a choice.

Jordan's office was immediately swarming with camera crews and flooded with fan mail from all over the country. Her appeal cut across party lines. One man even put up 25 billboards that said, "Thank you Barbara Jordan for explaining our Constitution." She had suddenly been catapulted into this spot where people looked at her as a moral authority at a particularly cynical moment in politics.

In Congress her colleagues like to joke that Jordan had the voice of God, which is kind of true. Her mom and dad were Baptist. Dad did some preaching. Her mom gave a lot of speeches, too. That's just how she grew up talking.

Jordan was a champion debater in college. She says that's where she picked up the style of speech. Two years after Watergate, Barbara got asked to give the big speech at the Democratic National Convention-- the keynote. The other keynote speaker that year was John Glenn, senator and astronaut. The crowd barely paid attention to him. Then Barbara Jordan took the stage.

Miki Meek

This video is totally electrifying to watch. The clapping went on for three minutes straight before Jordan could speak.

Miki Meek

She was the first African-American to give the convention's keynote. Afterward, there was a movement to make her Jimmy Carter's Vice President, though she quickly swatted that down. She issued a press release saying, he'd never pick someone who's both black and a woman.

Cut to 1992, 16 years later. Jordan's retired, leading a quiet life in Austin with her partner and teaching at a university, but the government needs someone to head its bipartisan immigration team. Susan Martin, a veteran of immigration policy fights on Capitol Hill, leads the search. Jordan had never worked on the issue, but she was Martin's first pick.

Miki Meek

At that time, Jordan had multiple sclerosis, sometimes needed a wheelchair and walker to get around. But Susan said she kept trying to convince her, telling her anti-immigrant views were spreading. The rhetoric was getting more racist, and starting to divide the country. Jordan was alarmed by all that. She didn't want immigrants to become scapegoats. So she said yes.

As someone who's been watching this immigration debate play out for the past few years it was incredible to hear what Barbara Jordan pulled off, how she managed to get people who didn't think they could agree to agree. She brought them to unanimous consensus on nearly everything. She forced them to stake out a middle ground on stuff that was controversial then and still is today.

I asked all the commissioners how exactly she got this thing to work. They told me that Jordan first set up a bunch of ground rules for how they could make decisions together, all nine of them. Again, here's Michael Teitelbaum, one of the Republican appointees to the commission.

Miki Meek

For Barbara, this approach was bigger than just the commission. She didn't see compromise as a sign of weakness. She saw it as a moral imperative. She taught this in her college ethics and political values classes. She believed it was actually immoral to not compromise if your job was to legislate.

When she was still a politician, she had a reputation as a pragmatist who despised ideologues and party purists. She liked drinking and playing guitar with conservatives after hours and she had no problems cutting deals or making friends with her polar opposites. In fact, in the Texas Senate, she thought it was the only way she could get any change to happen.

She'd take opportunities where she could find them, which is how she later got West Virginian Senator Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klux Klan member, to help her get enough votes to expand the Voting Rights Act to Mexican Americans.

On the commission, Jordan also worked with everyone to come up with language that would establish tone which was just as important as the actual policies themselves. The tone would be respectful, send a message that they were listening to both sides. So on one hand, she was tough on illegal immigration.

Miki Meek

But at the same time, she was pro immigration.

Miki Meek

To me, one of the most impressive things I learned about this bipartisan commission is just how all out they went for five years. Early on they were constantly on the road because they wanted input from the rest of the country. In El Paso, Chicago, Seattle, San Diego, Nogales, and a bunch of other places. They held public hearings that were basically open mic sessions, that lasted for hours. They also did ride alongs with border patrol, toured refugee camps in Kenya, and met with government officials in Mexico.

While they were there, one of the commissioners told me this poignant detail. When they got to buildings that didn't have ramps, they just picked Jordan up in her wheelchair and carried her in. When you compare today to back then, the single biggest difference is that it was possible for the two sides to just sit down and talk about how to cut down on illegal immigration, mainly because politicians were still all over the map on the issue. Positions hadn't hardened along predictable party lines.

Yes, Republicans were generally more skeptical about immigration, and Democrats were more in favor of it. But there were also lots of pro-business Republicans who wanted cheap labor, and pro-union Democrats who did not. They wanted to protect American workers. So this was a moment when things were more malleable, before immigration became such a loaded symbolic issue. It was a moment before so many families moved here.

Most of the undocumented were young single men coming for jobs. And it was a moment when, unlike today, both sides, Democrats and Republicans, agreed that illegal immigration was an urgent problem. Here's Bill Clinton giving his State of the Union in 1995. At that point, the undocumented population had grown to around five million, less than half of what it is now.

Miki Meek

In case this isn't clear, at the time protecting the working class from an influx of cheap labor was still a central part of the Democratic Party's platform. And the way to protect American workers and stop people from entering the country seemed obvious to the commission-- make it impossible for undocumented workers to get jobs. This was the easiest point of agreement for the commission. They voted to hit businesses with big fines and even jail time if they were caught hiring undocumented workers, and to create a mandatory electronic system that employers would use to check if job applicants were legal to work. This eventually became known as E-Verify.

A thornier issue was birthright citizenship, the thing that President Trump said he wanted to end just before the midterms. This is the law that says if you enter the country illegally and have a child here, that child is a citizen. Jordan settled this really quickly. She flexed her moral authority because birthright citizenship is in the Constitution. Here's one of the commissioners, Bruce Morrison.

Miki Meek

The 14th Amendment overturned the Dred Scott decision which said black people born in America could never be citizens.

Miki Meek

The most explosive issue the commission faced, the most difficult question Jordan guided them through, had to do with immigrant families arriving in the US. Specifically, should people be allowed to bring their whole extended families over-- parents and brothers and sisters, and once they get green cards their spouses and kids? President Trump calls this chain migration. He thinks it's unfair and dangerous, foreigners taking advantage of the system.

But Jordan's commission came up with a totally different way to frame this issue. She talked about it in a way that's much more humane than how we hear it talked about today, with no fear mongering. Though it took them a year to figure this out the commission said, let's just be practical about the situation. They said, look at how things are going now with family visas. It's a total backed up mess.

At the time, if you were a US citizen with a sibling in the Philippines, the wait time to get into the US was 18 years. The commissioners felt the US was making promises it couldn't keep. Again, here's former commissioner Bruce Morrison.

Miki Meek

They said, let's prioritize. Most people can agree that the most important thing is for parents to be together with their kids as quickly as possible. So they said, let's only give visas to parents and minor children, and not admit anyone else. This would knock lots of people off the waiting list.

Say for instance, you are an adult citizen and your brother and two sisters had been waiting for a decade. Suddenly, sorry, there's no space for them. Also, if your kids were adults, they'd be out of luck, too. So it was a tough policy, but it was generous, too. Doing this would cut the long backlogs, free up more visas. And they agreed to temporarily give out even more to bring in all the kids and spouses on the waiting list as quickly as possible.

Then once that list was cleared, they'd make sure new applicants got reunited with their families in the US within a year. They also built in special exceptions to allow in adult kids with disabilities and kids who put in applications as children but aged out because of long wait times. Of course, there was no getting around the fact that this approach would leave more than a million siblings and others out in the cold, unable to move to the US. And not surprisingly, this upset a lot of people, including Republicans.

Representative Dick Armey told The New York Times that the commission's proposal was a quote, "misguided attempt to make legal immigrants the scapegoats for America's problems." Protesters picketed the commission at public hearings. Here's a reporter pushing Barbara Jordan during a press conference in DC.

Miki Meek

In 1995, President Clinton came out strong backing the commission saying their recommendations were consistent with his own views which were quote, "pro family, pro work, pro naturalization." The commission's report waded into the most controversial issues and made big, tough recommendations. They'd eliminate the diversity visa lottery and shrink the number of visas for low wage, unskilled workers. They called for harsh sanctions against businesses that hire undocumented workers.

They'd gradually moved from an immigration system that brings in mostly family members to one that brings in workers who have skills the US lacks. They said every few years, Congress should review how many people should be admitted into the country based on what the economy needs. And for the short term, they propose cutting overall legal immigration by a third. But at the same time, there was another side to their recommendations.

The commission wanted to keep refugees flowing into the country. They wanted protections and due process for people who get caught up in the immigration system and alternatives to detention for them. They insisted that legal immigrants were entitled to public benefits and welfare. They called for stricter enforcement of hate crime laws. They wanted to fund job training for American workers who were displaced by immigrants and to give money and advice to communities with new large immigrant populations, hoping this would make the whole transition less fraught and resentful.

By late 1995, it's clear that getting all this passed won't be easy but they have the president and the immigration subcommittees in the House and Senate on their side. And at that critical moment, Barbara Jordan got sick because of complications from leukemia which she'd had for a while but kept secret. She died within weeks. She was 59 years old. Again, here's Susan Martin, the woman who first hired Jordan for the commission.

Miki Meek

That kind of authority, that's what was missing when Congress finally took up the commission's recommendations in 1996, without Jordan there to guide the debate. An astonishing variety of people came out and rallied against them. Immigrant rights groups teamed up with agribusiness and manufacturing to water down the sanctions against employers who hire undocumented workers. High tech firms opposed the cuts to worker visas. Religious groups didn't want any changes to family visas. And they won.

Miki Meek

This is Senator Alan Simpson. He was the chair of the Senate immigration subcommittee and had a front row seat as the proposals fell apart.

Miki Meek

Soon enough, President Clinton backed away from his earlier endorsement of the commission and ended up signing some of the most punitive legislation against legal permanent residents. It restricted their access to food stamps and Medicaid and made it easier to deport them. Barbara Jordan's vision of a grand compromise was dead. The commissioners and Senator Simpson all told me, if she'd lived--

Miki Meek

Today when Barbara Jordan's name comes up in politics, it's mainly from Republicans. That's one of the things that got me interested in her in the first place. These immigration hardliners waving around the name of a liberal black woman, a civil rights icon, saying she's with us. Here's former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, one of her biggest fans.

Miki Meek

Here's Laura Ingraham on Fox News with Bill O'Reilly.

Miki Meek

Even President Trump released a statement dedicated to Barbara Jordan, crediting her with his whole America first approach to immigration. The group that's been responsible for making Jordan this darling of immigration hardliners is called Numbers USA. They've even put her on TV again. This ad ran during the last presidential campaign.

Miki Meek

I asked all the former commissioners what Jordan would think of her name being used this way. Some weren't that offended by it, but one of the Democratic appointees, Bruce Morrison, remembers the first time he saw it.

Miki Meek

I get why Republicans cite her so much. They're saying, these ideas we're advocating, they're not crazy. Reasonable people thought these were reasonable solutions. Though Bruce Morrison points out, when the commission proposed these things they were part of a bigger package which also included things these Republicans don't support. And beyond that, Barbara Jordan's whole political vision was proudly about compromise and finding common ground. It's jarring to see her being cited by partisans as part of a bitter political war.

Meanwhile on immigration, the Democrats seem to have left the playing field. In the midterms, a common strategy for lots of candidates was to stick to the stuff that wasn't controversial like the Dreamers and then change the subject to health care.

Miki Meek

This is one of her good friends, former Texas Governor Ann Richards, speaking at her funeral in Houston. They used to go to Lady Longhorns basketball games together.

Miki Meek

Richards said it was about a mile long, and there was a woman who owned some property in the middle of it. And this woman, she put a gate across the lane and padlocked it.

Miki Meek

To fix the situation we are in now with immigration feels like it might actually require divine intervention. Things are way more complicated now than they were in the '90s. For starters, the undocumented population has gotten a lot bigger. It's gone from 3 million to 11 million.

It's no longer mostly single young men crossing back and forth across the border. We now have families who've been living here for a full generation, who've raised children. And as Barbara Jordan always feared, immigrants now get blamed for all sorts of problems. We're now in a situation she never anticipated.

The problem today is much worse than anything she'd ever imagined. And the two parties are so much further apart. They listen to each other so much less. It's hard to picture how even Barbara Jordan could get much done.

Ira Glass

Miki Meek is one of the producers of our show. Thanks to the other members of the Jordan commission we talked to, Bob Hill, Lindsey Lowell, Nelson Merced, Warren Leiden, and Paul Donnelly.

Ira Glass

This is Barbara Jordan speaking in a very divisive time just a couple of years after President Nixon's impeachment hearings and Vietnam at the Democratic National Convention.

Ira Glass

Coming up, your ex-wife has a few thoughts about your marriage and she makes a movie about it. That does not sound like that's going to be a good experience for you. That's in a minute on Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Today's show, Before Things Went To Hell, stories of the moment before things went terribly wrong back when things could've turned out differently, but of course they didn't. We've arrived at Act Two of our program-- Act Two, Director's Cut.

So the person in this next story finds himself in a situation that not many of us are ever going to be in. His ex-wife decided to revisit the part of their lives before their marriage went to hell and make a movie about it-- or anyway, about a couple whose life seems very, very parallel to theirs in lots of ways.

This fictional couple gets married real young, they're trying to make it in LA, the woman gets a big break, she leaves the husband at that point. This all happened in real life, too. The guy's name is Will Weldon. Elna Baker explains what happened next.

Elna Baker

Will heard about the movie from some friends when his ex-wife started working on it. The very thought of it made him anxious. His ex, Rebecca, eventually brought it up with him. She said the film was only loosely based on their marriage, which definitely did not help. He tried to put it out of his head. A year and a half later, he was scrolling around on-line.

Elna Baker

Will's candid about his flaws, admits he was kind of a dud as a husband. Will and Rebecca met when she was 23. He was just 19. They were together for eight years, married for almost five. During that time he was mostly unemployed, though he eventually started doing part time work, walking dogs and house sitting. He did some stand-up, but not very often. Mostly he'd spend his time--

Elna Baker

Because she was the ambitious one and disciplined. She wanted to be a TV writer. She'd wake up early to work on scripts and when he watched the trailer, that was in it.

Elna Baker

Seeing the trailer made it so much worse. Now he realized the film would probably return him to some very painful times he'd rather not relive, like the way their marriage ended.

Elna Baker

Will moved out after just a week, started crashing on friends' couches. He was devastated, didn't understand what went wrong. And there were other scenes from their lives that he'd hate to see in a movie.

Elna Baker

The film, which is called Paper Year, came out in early 2018. It's got 71% on Rotten Tomatoes. Critics comment on how authentic the couple's love coming undone feels. For a while, Will couldn't bring himself to see it but a month ago he suggested we watch it together, and I was into the idea. I'm going through a divorce right now.

It's a very strange time of life. I go on a lot of long walks. I stopped watching television for a year so I wouldn't avoid my feelings. All I read are self-help books. And when I go to parties, I corner divorced people and badger them for details about what this was like for them and how they got through it.

Divorce is like my own personal disaster porn. So, watching a movie about a divorce with the person who it happened to, it's all I want to do. And Will thought it would make it easier for him to see it for the first time.

I met Will where he was staying. He's dog sitting at a sleek Los Angeles home overlooking a canyon-- Furry throw pillows, an open layout, pomegranate and lemon trees framing your view of the valley, all really expensive. Will is on high alert. Anytime I move anything, he is careful to put it back exactly where it had been.

The movie opens with the couple, Dan and Franny, getting married in a courthouse, which Will and Rebecca also did. Dan lifts Franny and carries her out. The couple starts out really in love-- having lots of sex, laughing, kissing in bed.

Elna Baker

The guy's job in the film? Dog sitter.

Elna Baker

Wait, can I just point out the dog that you're house sitting in this movie is literally the same breed of dog that is sitting under the table right now?

Elna Baker

In fact, the house in the film where Dan and Franny do their dog sitting is a lot like the house Will and I are sitting in at this very moment-- similar layout and decor, same view.

Elna Baker

In another scene, Franny is sitting at her computer working on a script. Dan is trying to get her attention.

Elna Baker

The real life version of this would actually play out a little differently-- less fun and more sad. Will says he'd do everything he could to get out of her way when she was working.

Elna Baker

The movie, which I'll admit I'm the target audience for, I liked it. Marriage made Franny unhappy in the same way it made me unhappy, like my life had ended. I spent so much time thinking about whether or not I wanted to be with my husband, but I couldn't tell him that. So we had nothing to talk about, because if he asked me what I was thinking, the real answer would have been, I'm not sure if I love you anymore.

The scene that Will feared of Franny confiding in her mom and friends about all her husband's terrible qualities, and everyone's saying what they really think of him-- that never happens. There's no scene where anyone badmouths him. None at all. No one tells anyone to dump the loser. Instead, what happens is much more interesting. Late in the film, Franny sits down to talk to her mom about her marriage. In the scene, she's trying to convince herself to stay with him.

Elna Baker

Will sits forward in his seat. The day his marriage fell apart, Will came home and Rebecca was on the couch crying. She said she'd been talking to her mom but he never knew what their conversation was about. He felt like he was getting to see it now. In the scene, Franny, played by Eve Hewson, talks to her mom, played by Andie MacDowell.

Elna Baker

You're seeing how hard it was for her.

Elna Baker

But that's the story you've kind of been telling yourself.

Elna Baker

For years, Will had been telling himself the same version of their breakup, something he'd sandpapered down into this. Rebecca got her big break and then she dumped him out of the blue. He was heartbroken, she was happy and thriving. Moving on was easy for her. But watching this, it came flooding back-- at least a year, maybe more, when Rebecca was sad before their breakup. It was like time traveling through all this pain that he'd deleted from his memory.

We asked Rebecca to come talk about her movie with Will. She met us at the house where Will was house sitting. It's a little awkward. They talk about the weather and traffic. In the six years since their marriage ended, they've never had a conversation about it. And for her, understandably, this did not seem like the best way to begin one, by talking about her movie.

Elna Baker

But also, I feel like, the way you're saying it, it's like, oh, I just made a movie. It was just a movie. Why are you reading into this movie? But I feel like there are-- it's more specifically related to an experience that you had.

Elna Baker

Will tells Rebecca what he told me, how the most emotional part of the movie was seeing her side of things, how hard it was for her to decide to break apart and then to finally do it.

Oh, more personal info. My marriage seems really similar to theirs. My husband was mostly unemployed. I was the one who is working all the time. Neither of us were happy and I had to be the one to call

Elna Baker

Will had a story of how things ended that was cemented in his mind, and without the film he would have gone on thinking it, cherry picking the moments that made him feel the worst. Rebecca says if you want your ex to understand your breakup, the best way probably isn't to make a movie about it. It's way too much work and money and the most likely outcome is that they'll hate you for it.

Ira Glass

Elna Baker is one of the producers of our show.

Ira Glass

Our show was produced today by Elna Baker. People who worked on the show include Ben Calhoun, Zoe Chace, Sean Cole, Aviva DeKornfeld, Stephanie Foo, Damien Gray, Michelle Harris, David Kestenbaum, Seth Lind, Anna Martin, Miki Meeks, Stone Nelson, Nadia Raymond, Robyn Semien, Lilly Sullivan, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Our senior producer is Brian Reed. Our managing editor is Susan Burton.

Special thanks today Bud Meyers and Alvin Melathe. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can listen to our archive of over 600 episodes for absolutely free. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks as always to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia.

You know, I was short on money for lunch the other day. And I said, Torey, you have any cash? Do you have cash? He got really defensive.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories at This American Life.