Page 4 of Untether

—Milton,Paradise Lost

Sometimes they call mebrave.

Orplucky.

What the actual fuck? Am I a Dickens heroine? Who even says that?

Last month, after I stood on the steps of the courthouse in head-to-toe Stella McCartney as my attorney announced what I would call a major fucking win in my divorce from John, they called metriumphant.

Damn right I was triumphant. I liked that headline.

More recently, though, they called megauntanddrawn.

That’s right.

Aida makes a gaunt, drawn appearance post court case win.

Once again, I ask you: What the actual fuck?

Are you telling me there’s not a single person on theeditorial team of a national newspaper who studied English long enough at school to know tautology when they see it?

Also: I had just been for a five-mile jog. Damn right I was gaunt.

And drawn.

I hate it.

I hate when the tabloids pretend to champion you when, really, they’re waiting for you to stumble. Waiting for you to show that chink in your armour. They’re all the same, and it fucking sucks. Even if I’m used to it after seventeen years in this country.

I’m not usually fodder for these guys. They’re too busy withLove Islandalums and the royal family. But when they get the scoop that your husband, who’s a member of the British aristocracy, has been fucking his secretary and his intern and God knows who else, you can bet your life they’ll be all over you both.

They may paint him as the fuckboy and me as the wronged wife, but it’s never that simple. Because he’s one of them, and I’ll always be an outsider, an American who doesn’t really get how things work here. The left-wing papers have annihilated him, but the right-wing ones have been slower to condemn.

I hate that they’re so toxic, and I hate even more that I care. But it hurts, because I was always John’s young, hot, glamorous, successful wife as well as being a power player in the TV industry in my own right. And now I’m the spurned wife. You know, the one who’s gauntanddrawn, right?

I’m forty-six. I refuse to be portrayed as some cast-off reject who’s past her prime while my fifty-nine-year-old ex-husband fucks his way around the Houses of Parliament.

I refuse to accept that my fate is single-parenting twoboys while bemoaning the fact that guys my age all have their Tinder matches set to women of thirty-five and under. I’m a smart, attractive, successful woman in my sexual prime.

There’s only one solution, and that’s changing the narrative.

Unfortunately for John, that’s where I’m a fucking pro.

I have a plan so audacious it’ll make Tinder look like LinkedIn.

The audacious plan?A documentary comprising two sixty-minute episodes that lend themselves to leisurely storytelling, entitledAida Russell: Searching for Paradise.Of all the things I have straight in my head about this concept, the clearest is that I want this show to be elevated. Inspiring. There’s no place here for content that feels tawdry or shameful or ignoble.

And what could be more exalted than using Milton’s epic poem,Paradise Lost,as the framework? Hopefully not much. I envision the first episode as framing the facts. The societal and biological and psychological challenges facing women like me.Paradise Lost:the story of my journey to Alchemy.

Then,Paradise Found:the story of my journeyatAlchemy.

I loved this poem when I minored in English Literature. It may be a cornerstone of British literary history, but it’s a lot of fun. Adam, Eve, temptationandSatan?

Come on. It’s ripe for plundering. For modern, sexy reinterpretation.

It was Milton himself who mused:What hath night to do with sleep?

He sounds like he’s earned a place in my narrative.

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