The Compleat Steve :: About Steve :: Person :: Romance



				About Steve :: Person :: Romance :: Ellen Ladowsky Steve met Ellen Ladowsky when she interviewed him for Mirabella Magazine. Their relationship began with that meeting and moved on to romance. Ellen had done a number of articles in magazines dealing generally with relationships and a biography of Jackie Kennedy. With Kate Fillion, she wrote a book called How to Dump a Guy. The relationship eventually cooled, and Ellen moved from writer to regular on the television dating show, "Rendez-View."
			Interview KATE FILLION: How to Dump a Guy What happens when two women meet at a party and find they've both been dumped by the same guy? They have a good laugh, become good friends and write a hilarious self-help parody called C none other than C How to Dump a Guy: A Coward's Manual. Having recently returned from a nationwide tour with her co-author, Ellen Ladowsky, Fillion took a moment to talk about life, love and the pursuit of an elegant ditch. Before delving into satire, the 34-year-old journalist wrote Lip Service: The Myth of Female Virtue in Love, Sex and Friendship, and Lip Service: The Truth about Women's Darker Side in Love, Sex and Friendship, fairly serious academic books that look at stereotypes imposed on women. Currently helping to create a new Canadian newspaper called the National Post, Fillion will reunite with Ladowsky for their next irreverent project, which promises to make us smile. How did How to Dump a Guy come about? Actually, The Rules had just come out and, essentially, the theme of that book is that you should play hard-to-get if you like a guy. Ellen and I were talking on the phone one evening and she said, 'Well, how is a guy going to know he's been dumped then? You won't call him and he'll think that you're just doing the 'rules' on him.' So we decided that it was time to clarify this matter once and for all, for women and for men. We wanted to write a book that was funny and that helped women to laugh about relationships, because women tend to take relationships very seriously and to feel heartbroken when even a brief relationship ends. Why do we take our relationships so seriously? We get a very strong message from the culture that you're nothing if you're not with a man. There's tremendous pressure on women to be in relationships, so naturally when we're not in one or when we're in the wrong one, we think, 'Oh, my god, the world is coming to an end.' But that's a reaction to things that we're taught from the time that we're little girls. And we're not taught how to call it off? Absolutely not. We're taught how to nurture relationships and fix them and how to hang on to the man at all costs. And women tend to have great difficulty extricating themselves from relationships as a result. Most of us try to be too nice or we're too concerned about what the man will think of us afterwards, or we try to hedge our bets and stay with him, but still keep an eye on the horizon for the next man who might be coming along. The end result, frankly, is that you waste your own time, you waste his time and you hurt him more than you have to. Aren't relationships worth a little energy? I think that relationships are a wonderful thing and that most of us are probably happier with a mate, but certainly it's better to be alone than it is to be in a relationship with a guy who makes you miserable or, frankly, to be in a relationship where you behave like a complete shrew the whole time because the man isn't living up to your expectations, but you're too afraid to get out, so you think, 'Well, I'll just basically harangue him night and day until he turns into the kind of man I want.' It's preferable to be alone. And maybe women are subconsciously trying to get the men to dump them. That happens all the time. I certainly used to do that and I know that most of the women that we interviewed for the book did that. You think, 'Well, he can't get mad at me if he's the one who dumps me,' so you wind up doing horrible things in order to try to get him to dump you. What sort of feedback have you had on the book? Women find it empowering and enjoy it because it makes them laugh. Men like reading it, but it also scares them. We've taken them to a very frightening place, which is inside a woman's mind, because we're really verbalizing a lot of the things that women think but never say about men or only say to their girlfriends. But the primary purpose of the book is to make people laugh. Judging by the readings and the kinds of reviews that we've gotten, it's succeeding. Do women inundate you with their tales of dumping and being dumped? They do, and the funny thing is that whenever you read about these women in women's magazines, they present them as sobbing and not being able to get over the breakups. What we've experienced is women standing up and telling us their stories and laughing so hard that they couldn't finish the story, which is a great thing C for women to have a sense of humor about themselves. One of the points that we're trying to make throughout the book is that a lot of the things you do at the time of a breakup, you pretend you're doing to be nicer to the other person. For instance, you decide you'll let him down gently and dump him in installments instead of telling him right out. The truth is you're really doing that for yourself. My brother read part of the book and said he might use it the next time he needed to break up with somebody. Well, we don't advise that men use any of this advice on women. That's kind of like giving secrets to the Russians, you know. Did you interview any men while you were writing the book? We did. We asked men what is the worst way to be dumped, what is the best way to be dumped. It started out that we were just asking a few men and by the end of it, we had men who were friends of friends of friends of friends calling us. One professor actually called us and said, 'I hear you're writing a book on how women dump men. Well, a woman dumped me last week and I want you to tell your readers never to do it this way.' The men had very strong views about it. On the back cover you have a quote from Steve Martin. How did you get that? Actually Ellen had done an interview with him a couple of years before and they had just kind of stayed in touch very sporadically. He asked what she was working on and she sent him a copy of the book. He told her a few times how wonderful he thought it was and I said to her, 'Well, you must ask him if he'll let us say that on the back cover. He was so nice about it. He said, 'Of course, of course.' What do you want readers to walk away with? Another dozen copies of the book for all their friends. No, what I hope is that it helps women feel stronger in relationships. Reading the book feels like sitting down and talking to a really great girlfriend. It was uncensored and honest and fun. And that's what we wanted, so you're walking away with exactly the impression that we wanted women to have. Because the one thing that we were concerned about is that women not be turned off by the title, not think that this was somehow a man-hating book, because it's not. We think that men are wonderful and that's why we think you shouldn't treat them badly. If you want to get rid of one of them, do it in the kindest way possible so that you can move on and find Mr. Right.

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