Throughout history, authors have used their typewriters as loaded guns. Perhaps the most famous modern example is the feud between Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy. McCarthy famously said of Hellman on The Dick Cavett Show , "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman responded with the ultimate book revenge: a lawsuit for libel. But the literary world responded in kind. Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn is a thinly veiled account of her marriage to Carl Bernstein, exposing his infidelity to the world in a way that no divorce settlement ever could. She cooked him in a pot of ink, and he could never wash it off.
But the masterpiece came last. Using her interlibrary loan credentials, she ordered an obscure, out-of-print volume from a university archive: The Complete Guide to Silent Vengeance, Volume III: Psychological Withdrawals . She read it in one night. The next morning, she mailed Mark a single, handwritten card. It contained no threats, no pleas. Just a citation: book revenge