The XX Factor: What women really think.

What About Mrs. Rosenblat?

Since, as Juliet points out, Herman Rosenblat probably isn't delusional, what are we to make of his wife's role in the whole affair? She may not have written the book, but she has gone on television with her husband to tell the tale, making her just as complicit in the fabrication (that's her beaming alongside Herman in the NYT article on the hoax). It's impossible, of course, to truly pin down the motivation that made him cook up the fable, but I can't help but be curious about when she decided to go along with it and why. Was it just for the thrill of notoriety?

The Rosenblat story makes me think of the fantastic tale of Joyce Hatto, the reclusive pianist whose celebrated recordings were not her own but rather a bold pastiche of various virtuosic performances by other pianists. (The stunning deception also included, by the way, a made-up backing orchestra whose fictionalized conductor was supposedly a Holocaust survivor.) Her husband, Barry, it turned out, was the man behind the curtain. His pathology was a mix of love and delusion and self-promotion that was both repulsive and oddly sweet. He told The New Yorker, "You see, the thing about her was it meant her life hadn't been a waste of time." Is that the same kind of weird psychology at work in the Rosenblat marriage—the sense that it's somehow more valid to get recognition for a made-up version of it than to quietly make peace with the real one? I don't pretend to be an expert on marriage, though I'm sure that for any marriage lasting decades there are plenty of elisions and additions to the narrative the couple tells one another and others about their own particular love story and its creation myth. But small ones. Private ones. To go on national television and completely replace the bone structure of your life seems to me a personal denial that is a tragic one indeed (though not of course as widely harmful as the other sorts of denial this story could encourage), and I wonder just what the triggers are that makes that seem like the best option.