On December 19th, 2024, a therapist named Dr. Lilly Jay published an article in The Cut called “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?”
In this essay, she explains that as a therapist, she carefully chose to always keep her life private. She felt that this was better for her career, her own mental health, and her patients. But, her desire to remain private was complicated by the fact that she was married to a Broadway actor, her high school sweetheart, Ethan Slater, whose professional career actually depended on him getting more attention in the public eye.
The couple was able to maintain this balance, until her husband cheated on her with one of the most famous pop stars in the world, Ariana Grande. Thus, Dr. Lilly Jay, who had recently moved across the world to support her husband’s career, and who had recently survived the medically dangerous birth of their first child, was thrust into fame against her will. The essay finds Dr. Lilly Jay contending with her new fame and how it has impacted her career.
Today I’m going to explain the context and the drama surrounding this essay and I will let the review of the essay lead us into a conversation about fame and the attention economy and who gets caught in the crosshairs.
Ariana Grande Backstory
Ariana Grande is a fantastically talented singer, known for her wide range that extends up into the whistle tone registry. In a 2019 Rolling Stone article, one of her co-writers said “The way that Jimi Hendrix was with a guitar, Ariana Grande is like that with vocals.”
But despite Ariana Grande’s beauty and wealth and talent, her life has, unfortunately, been plagued by these tragic events. And I worry that she could follow the trajectory of many young starlets who are pushed into fame at a young age and, as a result, sometimes buckle under the pressure of that fame. Let me explain.
Ariana Grande initially came from a very wealthy family in Florida, then entered show business as a child on Broadway when she starred in the musical 13, written by Jason Robert Brown. From there, she was cast in a Nickelodeon show called Victorious about teenagers at a performing arts high school, which aired in 2010. It was a successful show, Ariana’s voice already stood out as something special, and this show would go on to launch her into a successful career as a musical artist.
Now I’m going to talk about what was going on behind the scenes at Nickelodeon, so if you’re triggered by the sexualization of minors then it’s a good time to close out the video. But in March 2024, a documentary called Quiet on Set came out about what was going on at Nickelodeon at this time when Ariana Grande was working there, and it has forced people to contend with the dark and dangerous side of childhood stardom. This documentary painted a picture of a group of children and teenagers, many of whom had parents who really wanted them to be famous and who were willing to turn a blind eye to creepy or red-flag behavior if that meant more fame or more money. And bad actors took advantage of this, to the point where, the documentary reveals, the children at this time were surrounded by pedophiles. (I’m really sorry I have to censor that word, but my videos can get age-restricted if I don’t.) Pedophiles go where children are, and they go where they can get away with their grooming and abuse, and Nickelodeon at this time had a culture that excused and even encouraged the sexualization of minors and pedophiles recognized that and they flocked there in droves. And at the center of this was a the producer and director Dan Schneider, who made many famous kids’ shows for Nickelodeon; shows that many of us grew up with, like Zoey 101, Drake and Josh, iCarly, The Amanda Show, and… Victorious, which is where he intersected with young Ariana Grande.
Dan Schneider himself hasn’t been accused of sexual misconduct, although Dan Schneider and Nickelodeon have paid a lot of money to former cast and crew members to keep quiet, as explained in Jeanette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad My Mom Died, and in Quiet on Set, so it’s not clear just how much of the picture we’re really getting. But cast members do say that Dan Schneider was cruel and overly demanding to the children and teens he worked with, he would yell at people, berate people, prevent them from leaving, late into the night. He was also known for making the children who worked for him give him massages, and he also seemed to have an obsession with feet, and often incorporated that into his shows. There are actually entire compilations of the children in Dan Schneider’s shows showing their feet, stepping in slime or sludge, pouring things on their feet, and the like.
And Ariana Grande said in an interview years later, that there were many overly sexual jokes and scenes that Dan Schneider wanted to do that were nixed by the network, and that was why he started a “web series,” where kids could go onto a certain website and watch “vlogs” from the characters of these shows, even though these scenes weren’t included in the episodes that aired on TV. And it was in these web series that we saw some of the most disturbing footage of Ariana Grande and her character. In Victorious, the joke about Ariana Grande’s character, Cat Valentine, was that she was pretty, but baby-brained. So there’s a scene in the web series where Cat is giggling maniacally as she rolls around on a bed and pours water all over herself and her open mouth. She also in one scene tries to fit her whole bare foot in her mouth. She plays with fruit and a bra. I won’t show the videos out of respect to her and the other actors, but I looked them up when I was researching this video, and even just watching them back made me feel sick. There’s even a video of Ariana Grande when she’s maybe 17 and Dan Schneider is recording her for the web series and she says “these scenes make me so nervous.” Years later in an interview she was say that the producers told her and the other kids that the sexual jokes and innuendos is what made their channel edgy, and it’s what set them apart from another famous kids channel whose name I won’t say because they’re famously litigious. But even in that interview all these years later, you could tell that Ariana Grande is still affected by her time at Nickelodeon and has trouble talking about it.
So she uses the fame that came from the TV show to start dropping music. And her style is pop for sure, but also sort of R&B, sort of rap, and for her genre she has this shockingly good voice. Her first album was called Yours Truly, then she had an album called My Everything, then an album called Dangerous Woman.
Then, on May 22nd, 2017, Ariana Grande was on tour for her album Dangerous Woman and she was performing in Manchester, England, when an Islamic terrorist, supposedly motivated by U.S. intervention in the Syrian Civil War, detonated a suicide bomb, leading to the death of 23 people and the injuring of more than 1,000 people. Remember that Ariana Grande’s fanbase at this time was still made of young people who watched her show on Nickelodeon, so many of the people who died were children or the caretakers accompanying them, and the youngest victim was just eight years old. Due to this attack, Ariana Grande has said that she started experiencing sympoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, a diagnosis that she still has. She immediately canceled the Dangerous Woman tour and tweeted “Broken. From the bottom of my heart, I am so, so sorry. I don’t have words.” But despite suffering from PTSD, Ariana Grande went back to Manchester to host and perform the One Love Manchester benefit concert, which raised tens of millions of dollars for the victims and their families, and Grande also re-released songs afterwards to raise more funds. As a result of her response, the city of Manchester made Ariana Grande the first honorary citizen of Manchester. She was 24 at the time of the bombing.
A few months after the bombing, Grande started dating the rapper, Mac Miller. The two made songs together and Mac Miller actually made a fantastic album called The Divine Feminine that many fans think was about Ariana Grande but if you were an obsessive Mac Miller fan like I was in my early 20s you would know that he actually started writing it when he was still with his long-time girlfriend Nomi Leasure and a lot of the songs are pretty explicitly about her with lyrics like “remember when you went away to college” and “you were with me when I was a starving artist.” (Nomi Leasure is also a great writer and wrote on her blog about the concept of “The Divine Feminine” for years before Mac’s album came out but, anywho…) But Mac Miller struggled with addiction, and his addiction problem eventually led to the dissolution of his relationship with Ariana. On May 10th, 2018, Ariana Grande announced on Instagram that, while she still loved Mac Miller, the two-year relationship had come to an end. But just ten days later, on May 20th, 2018, Ariana Grande was spotted at the Billboard Music Awards cuddling with the comedian Pete Davidson, and on May 21st, it was announced that the two were a couple.
Ariana Grande and Pete Davidson had a very public relationship, during which they both talked about each other in a very sexual way. For example, Ariana Grande tweeted about Pete Davidson having a huge penis, the two got matching tattoos as early as May 23rd, and by June 12th, they were engaged.
Just based on how public this relationship was, some fans speculated that there was an element for both of these people of making their exes jealous, because Pete got out of a long relationship before being with Ariana as well (we will talk later about the accusations of overlap in many of Ariana Grande’s relationships). Not long after Ariana and Mac broke up, he wrecked his car and got a DUI and a hit and run charge, and when fans blamed Ariana for this, she posted a story saying basically that it’s not appropriate to blame a woman because a man can’t get his shit together (and she was right about that, by the way). She came out with a new album in August called Sweetener, which featured a song titled just “pete davidson.”
But then in September, 2018, just after releasing his album Ladders, Mac Miller was found dead of a drug overdose in his Los Angeles home. He was 26. Pete Davidson has said that he knew his relationship with Ariana was over as soon as Mac Miller died. And he was right Ariana and Pete broke up a few weeks after Mac’s death.
What came next was what Ariana has called some of the darkest days of her life. She frequently struggled to sing on stage because she was crying so hard, she was reportedly drinking constantly. She came out with a song called “thank u, next” about her dating history that went super viral, so my perception from the outside is that instead of really taking time to grieve and heal, she instead had to keep performing, keep making money, stay relevant, stay famous, and I just can’t see that as a formula for a healthy, balanced life.
Right before the pandemic, Ariana Grande hired a real estate agent named Dalton Gomez to help her find a house and they started dating. They made their relationship public in May 2020. But their relationship was much more private than many of her other relationships, in large part because he wasn’t a celebrity. They dated for nine months, then got engaged, and they got married in May 2021 in a small, private ceremony with fewer than 20 people. So after years of whirlwind romances in the public eye, 28-year-old Ariana Grande finally found The One, or so it appeared.
The Drama
In November 2021, Universal Pictures announced that Ariana Grande would be interpreting the role of Galinda the Good Witch in the movie musical, Wicked. This is a role that Ariana Grande had supposedly dreamed of since she was a young girl on Broadway. In the process of filming, she met Ethan Slater, the star of The Spongebob Musical on Broadway who had been cast in the movie musical as Boq, a munchkin boy who has an unrequited love for Galinda.
Ethan had just recently become a dad. In August 2022, Ethan Slater welcomed his son with Dr. Lilly Jay, a therapist who worked in New York and New Jersey. Then around December 2022, Ethan and Lilly moved to London with their new baby to begin filming for Wicked. In November 2022, Slater posted on Instagram of his wife Lilly, “My best friend. 4 years married, 10 years together. And this is easily the best (and most *bizarre*) year yet.” Ariana Grande liked the post.
Around the same time of the birth of Ethan Slater’s son, Ariana Grande was spotted without her wedding ring, spurring rumors of trouble in her marriage. She responded to these rumors saying. “I’m just not wearing my wedding ring, it’s getting cleaned. I’m not getting a divorce before you start, don’t.”
March 27th, 2023, one source told the Daily Mall that Ethan Slater and Ariana Grande were “all over each other” at Michelle Yeoh’s Oscar party. But publicly, both Ethan and Ariana were still posting about and defending their respective marriages.
In May 2023, Ethan Slater posted a Mother’s Day tribute to Dr. Lilly Jay, writing, “Happy first Mother’s Day to the most loving, caring, and wonderful mom/person in the world.” Ariana Grande liked the post.
Then on May 15th, 2023, Ariana posted a photo celebrating her second anniversary with her husband Dalton. She wrote. “2. And 3.5 together. I love him so.”
But about a month and a half later, on July 17th, 2023, Dalton and Ariana separated, and some sources even said they had been separated for a few months. Reportedly, the relationship underwent strain when Ariana moved to London for filming, while Dalton had to stay in LA for his career. Ariana had again been photographed without her wedding ring, and she also deleted several photos of Dalton Gomez from her Instagram feed.
But just three days after Dalton and Ariana made their divorce public, several sources started telling magazines that Ariana was dating Ethan Slater, and that he was also separated from his wife. But there had been no public announcement of Ethan Slater and Dr. Lilly Jay getting divorced. The news of this relationship went viral, and Slater started getting a sea of hate, so he quickly made his Instagram private.
A source said that on set, Ariana and Ethan had not been careful about hiding their relationship, even holding hands and kissing between takes for Wicked. The same source also said that a few days before news of their relationship broke, Ethan sat down with Lilly and told her that he wanted a divorce, and she was “completely blindsided” and “a wreck.” He officially filed for divorce on July 25th.
On July 27th, Lilly reportedly said to Page Six, “[Ariana’s] the story, really. Not a girl’s girl. My family is just collateral damage.” But there were reports afterwards that she didn’t intend to be quoted saying that, and she may have misunderstood what was on the record and what was off the record. Remember that she is a normal person; she’s a therapist, not a media-trained celebrity.
At this point, a lot of people who worked on the Wicked movie started to come forward and say that Ariana and Ethan had been “sloppy,” making out at pubs and at parties, and Dalton, Ariana, Ethan, and Lilly even went on multiple double dates while both of them were still married but having affairs with each other.
On January 12th, 2024, Ariana Grande dropped a single called “Yes, And?” with lyrics like “Don’t comment on my body, do not reply. / Your business is yours and mine is mine. / Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?”
On June 11th, 2024 Ariana released another song called “That Boy is Mine.”
On September 30th, 2024, Ariana Grande did an interview with Vanity Fair in which she again defended Ethan Slater, saying “The most disappointing part was to see so many people believe the worst version of it. There couldn’t be a less accurate depiction of a human being than the one that the tabloids spread about him. No one on this earth tries harder or spreads themselves thinner to be there for the people that he loves and cares about. There is no one on this earth with a better heart, and that is something that no bullshit tabloid can rewrite in real life.” It does cause you to wonder, if you really don’t want people to accuse you guys of having an immature or adulterous relationship then why do you write songs about it? Why are you writing a song called “That Boy is Mine” when you are 31 and your relationship publicly traumatized and humiliated just, like, a normal therapist in New Jersey who just became a mom? Anyways, more on that later.
Ariana Grande Accused of Having a History of Cheating
This whole drama caused people and fans to start digging up instances in the past of Ariana Grande going after men who were taken or cheating on her partners. So, for example, from 2012-2014 she was dating Jai Brooks, a Australian YouTuber, and at one point, when they broke up, he made a long post saying that Ariana had cheated on him. Then in 2014, she started dating the rapper Big Sean. Years later, Big Sean’s ex-fiance, the late Naya Rivera, would write in her memoir, Sorry Not Sorry, that her relationship with Big Sean came to an end when she showed up at his house unannounced and found Ariana Grande, the girl who he had told her not to worry about, sitting on his couch.
After Ariana and Mac Miller started dating, Mac Miller’s ex, Nomi Leasure, who had kept an active blog throughout her years-long relationship with Mac, published a five-part blog series about her breakup with Mac called “The Art of Healing.” And Nomi has always had a very poetic writing style so there are a lot of things left up to interpretation. But some things that she wrote have led some fans to speculate that there was cheating involved in the dissolution of their relationship. For example, she wrote, “You were tucked in the hills of California, but I felt your chill. A sudden change of the wind. A woman always knows.”
Fast forward to 2018 when Ariana and Mac were still together, and, we know now from an interview with Pete Davidson on the Howard Stern radio show, Ariana invited Pete to her Met Gala after-party, where they kissed on her Airbnb couch for the first time. So that party was May 7th, 2018, and Ariana Grande announced that her and Mac broke up on May 9th, 2018. Another detail, is that Pete Davidson was still publicly dating his girlfriend Cazzie David and as late as April 2018, so just a month before this Met Gala situation, he was publicly saying in his standup that he would “probably marry” Cazzie, and on May 3rd, so just four days before the Met Gala, Cazzie was posting coupley pictures with Pete on Instagram, so it seems like there could have been some overlap there as well, but my eyes hurt from reading 2018 Tumblr posts so I’m gonna move on.
Other fans have even pointed out that when Ariana Grande started publicly dating Dalton Gomez, his ex-girlfriend posted “when he ends up with the one he told you not to worry about.” This led some people to wonder if there was also an element there of Ariana “stealing” Dalton from his ex.
In the album, Thank U, Next, which came out in 2019 when Ariana was dating Pete, she released a song called “Break up with your girlfriend, I’m bored.” The lyrics say:
Took one fuckin’ look at your face
Now I wanna know how you taste
Usually don’t give it away
But you know I’m out here thinkin’ ‘bout it
Then I realize she’s right there
And I’m at home like: Damn, this ain’t fair
Break up with your girlfriend
‘cause I’m bored
…
You’re singin’ my songs in the streets,
Actin’ all innocent, please
When I know you’re out here thinkin’ ‘bout it
Then you realize she’s right there
And you’re at home like: Damn, she can’t compare
The term “homewrecker” is often used with the misogynistic goal of blaming a woman for a man’s actions. For example, if a man has a mid-life crisis and abandons his family for a fling with an intern, then all the blame shouldn’t be placed on the intern for seducing him away from his wife and kids, when he was ultimately, an adult who made the conscious decision to leave his family. The quote from the fantastic novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini puts it this way: “Like a compass needle that points north, a man’s accusing finger always finds a woman.”
But also, let’s be honest with each other. If I were dating somebody, and they cheated on me with Ariana Grande, and then she wrote this song about me, I mean, I would have to fight her. I don’t know how to fight but she would leave me no choice.
I might actually argue that it could be more misogynistic to completely reduce Ariana Grande in situations like this to a passive participant or even a victim, when what we’re witnessing is not just a pattern of behavior on her part and an intentionality in pursuing men in monogamous relationships but also a sort of relishing in it, writing songs about how “that boy is mine” and “his girlfriend can’t compare.” It almost sounds like she enjoys the power that comes with getting someone in a committed relationship to choose you over their current partner. Also, if I were her partner, I might even worry if she will still want to be with me once that initial drama and power trip has worn off, like a child in the playground who screams for the toy that another kid has until they get it, play with it for two seconds, then leave it in the dust. And these mega-wealthy celebrities can and often do exhibit very childlike behavior, especially if they became famous when they were very young, because they’ve been surrounded by yes-men who make excuses for them from a young age, and thus have often missed out on the character development that comes from not getting special treatment all the time.
And Ariana Grande did get away with this behavior without many repercussions for a long time, even in terms of her public image. But she’s older now. She’s 31. She wasn’t dating somebody else. She was married. And she wasn’t saying “break up with your boyfriend, I’m bored,” she was saying leave your wife… and your newborn baby. A wife who I have befriended. A baby who I have held.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go through Dr. Lilly Jay’s essay in The Cut, in which she reveals some more personal details about what it was like for her being on the other side of a celebrity’s impulses.
Breakdown of Dr. Lilly Jay’s Essay
Remember that by the time this essay came out, Ariana Grande already had her chance to respond to the drama. She had the mic, and she used that time to say, “Why do you care so much whose dick I ride?” and “That boy is mine.” Now, it is perfectly within the right of Dr. Lilly Jay to respond to Ms. Grande in her own format of choice, and she has chosen an 1,800-word essay titled “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?”
So let’s note that there is a difference in format here. Ariana Grande shared her opinions in interviews and songs, while Dr. Lilly Jay shared hers in an essay, so it’s almost inevitable that Dr. Lilly Jay’s response is going to sound more thought-out and more carefully delivered. On top of that, there is a large educational difference between Ariana Grande and Dr. Lilly Jay, and you’ll see in Dr. Lilly Jay’s essay that she has a more academic, refined writing style. I think we should keep the formatting difference in mind when we’re comparing the two responses– it’s not necessarily that Ariana Grande can’t form a more cohesive argument in favor of her own actions; it instead might just be that a cohesive thesis argument isn’t the priority when you’re writing lyrics to a catchy pop song.
With this essay, Dr. Lilly Jay made an interesting choice. Instead of addressing this essay to Ariana Grande or to her ex-husband, instead of partaking in the petty high school drama of fighting over that 32 year old “boy,” she has instead addressed her essay to her future patients.
She writes, “In this season of shock and mourning, over a year after the end of my marriage was made public, I deeply miss the life of invisibility I created for myself as a psychologist specializing in women’s mental health.”
She explains the concept of transference, which is the process by which a patient uses the therapist to reflect back their own personal insecurities or issues in relationships. For example, if a patient starts to say during a session, “Sorry, you’re probably thinking, ‘these aren’t even real problems; my problems are so much bigger.’ I’m talking about myself too much. What’s going on with you?” Then the therapist might use that to conclude that the patient has been told at some point in the past that their problems aren’t relevant. Or maybe they had a caretaker with so many personal issues that they learned to minimize their own needs and desires. That confession thus becomes a valuable gift for the therapist and it sheds light on that patient’s progress and history. But if the therapist came into the session talking about their own personal life, and if the patient really knew what the therapist’s life was like, then they might not have been compelled to make that some statement to minimize their own issues, or at least their statement would have been affected by the therapist’s inital opening up, which would make it a less relevant observation.
Dr. Lilly Jay explains it this way: “As a therapist, part of what I could offer my patients was the experience of being in relation with someone else without the complexities of a personal relationship. I was never meant to be fully known to them. Research consistently indicates that the strongest predictor of success in therapy is the therapeutic alliance — the rapport between therapist and patient — and traditionally, therapists rigorously protect this for our patients with clear boundaries. By reducing the white noise of personal information, or self-disclosures, therapists provide patients with a unique opportunity to feel connected to another person by care alone.”
But Dr. Jay explains that the first time she was truly unable to maintain this anonymity was when she got pregnant. At the time, she was working at CHOP, the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and she was working specifically with the mothers of babies who had severe or fatal diseases. This work, day-in and day-out naturally caused her to feel very anxious about her pregnancy, but also very guarded, and she says she would hide her healthy pregnancy to avoid inciting in her patients feelings of envy or bitterness. She was grateful when her patients never mentioned or asked about her pregnancy.
Despite the difficulty of this type of work, she still says that this was a joyful time in her life. She writes “I loved my life working in a helping profession and being immersed in the details of other people’s stories rather than documenting my own narrative for public consumption.” She goes on to admit that even before she became a therapist, she was always very private. She hasn’t been on social media since she was 17 when she deactivated her Facebook account. She did this because her birthday was coming, and she didn’t want to measure herself in likes or messages. She says that becoming a psychologist “solidified” her detachment from social media as her graduate school professors encouraged her and her classmates to be very wary of what their patients can find out about them online.
But at the same time, she says that her partner, who she doesn’t mention by name, was in a career where he actually needed to be in the public eye. She writes, “It was a tenuous balance — my profession, which requires privacy, and his, which is measured in applause.” But she says they spoke at length about this contrast and both landed on specific boundaries and expectations with one another about how they can ensure a relationship with social media that works for both of them.
Dr. Jay then admits that she had a scary pregnancy because she had preeclampsia, a life-threatening birth complication. Despite the risk associated with her pregnancy she says it was the happiest time of her life. She writes, “During my pregnancy, I had never felt happier nor more aware of how precarious happiness could be. When my baby was first placed on my chest, still tethered to me by his umbilical cord, I sobbed with relief. We had done it. He had arrived. I survived preeclampsia… and finally, our family was whole.”
She thought that she had overcome the greatest challenge of her new family’s life, but it turns out the most difficult challenge of her life was around the corner. She writes: “As a perinatal psychologist, I knew all the statistics — how vulnerable a marriage is in the postpartum period, how vital community connection is in preventing depression and anxiety, how new parenthood impacts a whole family — but I confidently moved to another country with my 2-month-old baby and my husband to support his career. Consumed by the magic and mundanity of new motherhood, I didn’t understand the growing distance between us.”
Just with this little glimpse into her life, we’re already seeing major sacrifices that she’s made for her marriage. Carrying and having a baby with your partner, with the toll it takes on your body, and even the risk that implies for your own life, that can be perhaps the greatest gift you can give a person and the ultimate expression of love. Then to move to a foreign country just two months postpartum and especially after such a scary pregnancy, is another major sacrifice. It’s also very clear from this essay that Lilly is very serious about her career and her patients, and she likely also had to give up many, if not all, of her patient-doctor relationships that she had fostered for years in order to move to London. But it seems like she was glad to take these steps because it meant being with her partner and with their new baby.
She then skips over the details of the dissolution of her marriage, assuming we already know the backstory, and tells us about her current reality and her current days, which she spends taking care of her son and working on her “private project of accepting the sudden public downfall of [her] marriage.”
In writing, she reminds herself to not feel shame, and she convinces herself not to simply hide away. Then she writes my favorite line in the essay, “Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high-school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child.” Chef’s kiss.
She then goes on to sing the praises of her ex-husband and celebrate him. She says that despite how they split parenting time, they always love their son “fiercely.” But then she admits that is has been difficult to witness the promotion of the Wicked movie, which had a $150 million marketing budget and was inescapable for months. She says, “As for me, days with my son are sunny. Days when I can’t escape the promotion of a movie associated with the saddest days of my life are darker.”
She says that the tabloids have painted her as a “voiceless ex-wife,” an image which she hates to think that her patients may have seen. She also shares that being suddenly thrust into the public eye has impacted her career. For example, she says that she had a job offer when she came back from maternity leave, that, after another round of stories about her in the tabloids, suddenly disappeared. She mentions other patients she had who were scheduled to meet her before her public divorce, then never showed up for their appointment. She writes: “On my darker days, I railed against the unfairness of a public divorce, asking… Who would trust a cardiologist who had a heart attack because they never got an EKG?”
She also makes observations on what she calls “this digital land,” presumably of social media and tabloids and the world of the chronically online, where she calls herself a “visitor.” For her, it feels bizarre to see herself so poorly represented in the press– a “shoddy mosaic of others’ words and impressions.” And I can see how strange it would be as a foreigner on social media to witness the remarkably low if not non-existent standards for what is considered truth, especially if you’re coming from a clinical or medical environment. She contends with this contradiction in which she has never wanted to be the center of attention, but she also doesn’t want to be erased or cast aside in this story.
And now that she has painted a clear picture of what was difficult about this situation, she wraps the essay up with a lovely character arc. She writes, “While I still firmly believe in following my patients’ leads and not presuming to know what parts of my personhood resonate with them, the publicity I did not consent to increasingly feels like both a challenge and an opportunity.” She muses and hopes that perhaps her vulnerability could become a point of connection with her patients.
“My entire adult life, I feared that loss of control and postpartum depression would destroy me. One day in London, I looked up and found that they had both arrived. And I am okay.”
She says, “If I can’t be invisible anymore, then I might as well introduce myself.” And the way she has chosen to introduce herself is as someone who, yes, went through immense, public pain, shame, and fear, but also as someone who survived it. “Avoidance maintains fear, and maybe it’s time to accept that I’m not unknown anymore.”
I will read her final paragraph here: “So consider this essay my message in a bottle sent out to sea to maybe wash up at my patients’ feet someday: I’m sorry I can’t be invisible anymore (really, more than you know, I’m sorry). This information about me will rush in like water filling all of the blank spaces where you could have, should have, would have imagined me to be whomever you needed. I hope this is okay, this psychologist of yours who had a window into her life pried open. Knowing what you now know, I can say with both personal and professional authority, you are so much stronger than you assume. Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward. I’d tell you (and myself) to let go of the worries — our anxious minds are creative but not particularly good guessers about the future. If you want to or need to, we can acknowledge what you now know about me, and then we’ll quickly work our way back to your story with a question that is a therapy classic for good reason: And how did that make you feel?”
And you know, doc, your essay made me feel good. It made me feel very good. Because good writing makes me happy! And your essay was good writing. Let’s talk about why.
Discussion
To lead us into this discussion, let’s take a quote from the great modern philosopher, Natalie Wynn.
“In history, there are ages of reason, and there are ages of spectacle. And it’s important to know which one you’re in. Our America, our internet, is not ancient Athens. It’s Rome. And your problem is you think you’re in the forum, but you’re really in the circus.”
We are living in an attention economy. There are millions of people, in the modern world who make more money, depending on how much attention you pay to them. The oligarchs who sat behind Trump at his inauguration make more money when more people pay attention to things on their apps. They have an enormous incentive to keep you addicted to those apps. Performers and influencers and celebrities also have an enormous financial incentive to keep your eyes on them. More eyes means more streams, more likes, more ad revenue, more investor money, and, of course, for the viewer, more time out of your one wild and precious life. When we boycott, we are reminded that we vote with our wallets, but also don’t forget that we vote with our eyeballs.
Some of the most powerful people alive today, not just in the entertainment industry, but also in politics, in music, in medicine, they aren’t the people who are the most qualified, the most well-meaning, the most talented, or of the highest moral standing. Often, instead, the most powerful people in our modern world are those who know how to get and keep your attention.
Donald Trump is someone who understands the attention economy intimately. Johnny Harris found in his video about Trump that decades before becoming president, he used to call tabloids and spread lies about himself under a fake name, just to stay relevant. Even if he was in the news for “negative” things, like having an affair, he would intentionally fan the flame. And he fanned that flame all the way up to the presidency, twice. During both elections, even the most liberal news outlets talked about Trump more than they talked about their own candidates, and even though much of what they were saying about Trump was negative, he still had the eyes of the entire political spectrum. Kim Kardashian has openly said that in the beginning of her career, she didn’t care what she had to do, what she had to wear, or where she had to go, so long as it meant staying in front of the cameras. “Any time I could go to an event, I would. Because I just wanted my picture taken. That’s all that mattered to me.” And she has “attentioned” herself into becoming a billionaire.
Sally Rooney had some choice words about the state of the attention economy in her book Beautiful World Where Are You, personally my favorite Sally Rooney book, when she wrote: “People who intentionally become famous – I mean people who, after a little taste of fame, want more and more of it – are, and I honestly believe this, deeply psychologically ill. The fact that we are exposed to these people everywhere in our culture, as if they are not only normal but attractive and enviable, indicates the extent of our disfiguring social disease.”
I agree with this quote by Sally Rooney, but I would like to give it a “yes, and” and remind ourselves that there are many people in the modern world who are fame-seeking, not because they personally want to be famous, but because they’ve chosen a career, for example, a career in the arts, that requires them to promote themselves, regardless of whether or not they think that promotion is healthy practice. And especially if they live in a country that doesn’t have much social support or a safety net for small artists, freelancers, or students, such as affordable healthcare or art subsidies, then many artists who don’t come from wealthy families feel like they must self-promote or change careers. And I wouldn’t label those people as deeply psychologically ill, in fact I would argue that they’re having a pretty reasonable response to their environment, even if, the environment itself is ill.
Now, in Ariana Grande’s case, her relationship to fame-seeking and the attention economy is a bit more complex than someone like Donald Trump or Kim Kardashian who were adults who consciously chose to participate in fame, whereas Ariana Grande became famous as a child. But at the level of fame that Ariana Grande has achieved, there is almost certainly, some element of agency and choice in becoming mega-famous. At the very least, people on her team, her publicists and agents and assistants and marketers and producers and the hundreds of people whose checks at the end of the month depend on how famous or not famous she gets, understand that she benefits from attention– good or bad.
This whole drama, the conversation around Ariana Grande being a home-wrecker or an icon or a villain, Ethan Slater leaving his wife, Ariana Grande divorcing her husband, all of this has led to more people buying tickets to Wicked, more streams on Ariana Grande’s songs, and more money lining the pockets of Ariana Grande and her whole team. They understand that. And how do I know that they understand that? Because if she really was victimized by the press and if she really doesn’t want us to talk about it, then why does she keep singing about it? If she really doesn’t want people to call her a homewrecker, then why does she deliberately portray herself that way in her songs? Because either Ariana Grande, or the people on her team, know and understand that all press is good press. Welcome to the circus.
But who gets caught in the crosshairs of the media frenzy? Well, in this case, a doctor who actively chose to not be involved in social media, whose day job is helping grieving mothers, who just recently survived a life-threatening pregnancy, and who, honestly, seems like a really, really nice lady who didn’t deserve any of this. And even with all the money that Ariana sinks into PR, and even though we don’t know these people, it’s just hard to believe that the bad guy in all of this is the therapist who helps the moms of sick kids for work and deleted her Facebook account because she wanted to spend her birthday with loved ones instead of checking how many likes she got. And she has said that she regrets going to the tabloids and calling Ariana “not a girl’s girl,” but that just makes her more normal and relatable to me, to be honest, again, she hasn’t been media trained, and of all the foul things that she could have called Ariana Grande, saying she’s “not a girl’s girl” is not that bad, and in this scenario… pretty accurate.
Since I really don’t know anyone involved here, maybe there is some version of this story where Dr. Lilly Jay was mistreating her husband, and Ariana Grande’s husband was also mistreating her and Ethan Slater and Ariana Grande got together and saved each other, but from what we do know, I just find that hard to believe. That narrative seems more like the mental gymnastics of an Ariana Grande super-fan than a reasonable theory.
But ultimately, call it karma, or balance, or cause-and-effect, often the people who suffer the most from the fame roller coaster are the ones who also benefit most from it. Becoming famous is like selling your soul to the devil. You get all this money and power and attention, but in the process, so many of these talented people end up never really forming a cohesive personal identity, because they are treated both by the public and by the people in their inner circle, like a circus animal. And even their personal lives become a performance– their most private grief and pain becomes just the latest trick, designed to get more clicks, more comments, and more eyes. Ariana Grande has been accused of having no identity. She changes her look, her accent, her personality, and I don’t know her personally, but if we take what we do know, which are these public traumas and her reactions to them, for example doubling down and saying “that boy is mine,” then what we’re witnessing is not the response of a psychologically healthy woman in her 30s. Dr. Lilly Jay’s response, in contrast. was very mature and psychologically resilient and what many would expect from someone that age. But sometimes wealth and privilege infantilizes people.
Exposes about reality TV, like The Reality of Reality TV by D. S. Houghton, share stories of how crew members on reality TV shows befriend the cast members and feed them lies about other cast members just to stir up the drama. And if you’re a celebrity and you have these huge teams of people who are financially dependent on how much people talk about you and hear about you and listen to your songs to maybe get the latest gossip about the drama, then your team has a pretty strong motivator to tell you things like, “Yeah go after that guy. Who cares that he’s married?” “I think your next song should be about the drama. You deserve to tell your side of the story.” “No no no don’t take time to process your emotions and heal from a divorce. The charts need us. Whatever immature, not-well-thought-out, emotional response that you feel right now is perfect. Get on out there!”
Even if the people in Ariana Grande’s circle aren’t pressuring her to ramp up the drama, being surrounded by yes-men and being rich in a country where money is so celebrated and heralded and held up as the pinnacle of all joy and success, that alone can cause you to have this entitled mentality of, “Why shouldn’t I have everything I want? I deserve it. Even if the thing I want is married to someone else and recently had a baby.” Ariana Grande’s lyrics to 7 Rings says:
Whoever said money can’t solve your problems
Must not have had enough money to solve them
They say: Which one? I say: No, I want all of them
Happiness is the same price as red-bottoms
I want it, I got it, I want it, I got it
I see it, I like it, I want it, I got it
And this was a song that she released during what she later referred to as the darkest and unhealthiest period of her life. She says in that song that she bought diamond rings for all of her bitches. In that scenario, maybe a real friend would say: “Hey, every time I see you, you’re drunk and every time you get drunk you’re spending, like, a lot of money. Are you okay? Like are you really okay?” But an enabler says: “Thank you for the diamond! This would be so cute with a matching pearl. Why don’t we get another round?” And the more rich and famous you get, the more likely it is that you end up surrounded by enablers.
So I hope that Ethan Slater knows what fame really comes with. I’m sure he was excited by the opportunity to be with Ariana as a person, but there almost certainly was some element of him being attracted to the fame a fortune that Ariana comes with. I mean, he did choose to be a Broadway star; there is likely at least a part of him that loves the spotlight and aches for applause. And this affair promised him the spotlight. It seduced him away from a life of relative anonymity, and what does it cost? Well, only your wife. Only your son. Only your soul.
And I get it– new crushes are sexy and exciting. Any 15-year-old will tell you that. But hopefully by the time you’ve lived the life of a 15-year-old twice over you know that you can’t trust the initial rush of lust and when you make a commitment to marry someone you choose to forgo persuing every little impulse, and in exchange you get something much more powerful, which is love. Real, committed, love. You know, love? The point of being alive? When you marry someone you make a promise to not hurt that person who chose you. You unite your families and your goals and you stand in front of God and the state and everyone who loves you and you promise to love and take care of each other in this life and the next. You promise to do what’s best for your children and the community that supported and raised you. And if just a few weeks of exposure to a sparkly celebrity with filler and extensions is enough to make you go back on that promise then that’s not a testament to the power of the person you left your spouse for, that’s a testament to your lack of self-control, and your lack of trustworthiness, and your willingness to betray the people who love you and who trusted you.
That said, just a reminder, I really don’t know what went down between these people. Neither do you. In the attention economy, fame is cheap, and she’s quick. Something that was a meme last week already feels stale after just a few days. So if it’s any consolation to the people involved in this drama: the public, the crowd, we will forget about this and move on to some other drama, some other infidelity or hot piece of gossip. But Ethan Slater’s kid won’t forget. The people who Ethan Slater stands in front of after a show, all those people who applaud him or boo him or mock him, they will forget about him and what he did to please them, or what all these celebrities do to stay relevant every few months. But decades later, after the crowd goes home and the ghost light comes out and you washed all the stage makeup off, there’s one kid here who will still remember what this guy did to his mom, and that’s what Ethan Slater has to live with and that’s what should matter to him, not my opinion as some random stranger on the Internet. But, I talked a lot about the women in this whole ordeal, so I didn’t want it to seem like I was letting Ethan Slater off the hook, so if you want my irrelevant opinion on Broadway Spongebob: in the words of my late grandmother, he’s no good.
And as for Dr. Lilly Jay, I can hear your anxieties in this essay. Your example of the cardiologist who should have gotten an EKG makes me think that you feel you should have seen this coming somehow; as if there were some element of guilt on your part, but that shame belongs entirely to your ex-husband– not to you. You also fear that this public scandal will scare away potential patients, as if your ex-husband’s errors somehow made you a less qualified professional. This is a common mistake: sometimes we think that our pain, our vulnerability, and our grief separates us from other people or makes us uniquely burdened. But in reality our pain is exactly what connects us to others. That grief is something we all have in common, and that we all try to hide to varying degrees of success. The grace, honesty, and poise that you have demonstrated in this essay will not only not scare away your potential patients, it will make them more likely to want to work with you so that they, too, can learn how to maintain such composure and strength when they’re hurt by someone who they trusted. I want to commend you, for not vicitmizing yourself in this essay when you could have. For not speaking poorly of your child’s father and his new girlfriend. You could have joined them in the circus, but instead of going after them in the ring, you stood outside the tent and criticized the circus itself. You acknowledged how difficult this has been, but only in the context of how you overcame it, and how you learned from it, and how you’ve carried on. In my irrelevant opinion, you’re a good example for your boy.
My name is Siobhan Brier Aguilar. I’m a writer. If you want to keep up with my writing, you can sign up for my newsletter on my website, linked in the description. I just share like what I’m writing and what I’m working on. And you can follow me on Insta, @siowriter, one word, also linked below. I’m trying to post more relevant stuff about writing on my Insta. Message me or comment stories that you want me to review, like articles or books that you think have something to bite into; something that can lead us to a greater discussion. And that’s all. Be well. Bye!
