The Partner's Phoenix discussion

Left in His Closet
Mary Krome

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Left in His Closet by Mary A. Krome
Synopsis

She doesn't know if he knew who he was when they got married. All she knows is the truth lies somewhere in his coming out, a process she is ill-equipped to understand, much less explain.

Soledad runs away, inventing a new past each time a man learns of her fourteen-year marriage to Bob. Nita accidentally overhears Jim talking to his lover. Judy struggles with the reaction of her children when they discover their family's twenty-year secret.

These three courageous women are the ex-wives of the men they loved; men who didn't leave them for another woman, but rather, a man. Because of circumstances they cannot control, each woman clarifies that which she has yet to make peace with herself her own identity. By trying to fit their confusing situation into a logical framework and drawing conclusions with limited information, each woman finds herself trapped in a moral and political debate where black and white no longer exists. Swallowed up by shades of gray, they move on. Some slowly pick up the shattered pieces of a happy marriage, some quickly seek out the first man that will make them feel like a woman again, and others methodically immerse themselves in helping others through similar experiences so they can make sense of their lives.

Left in His Closet opens the doors of understanding to the lesser defined experience the heterosexual spouse of gay partner.
296 pages - $18.99 (paperback)

Mary Krome
Founder of The Partner's Phoenix

ABOUT THE AUTHOR OF LEFT IN HIS CLOSET - MARY KROME

Dr. Mary Krome is executive director and founder of The Partner's Phoenix, consulting and lecturing regularly on 1) identity confusion and relational concerns of heterosexual partners when their loved one comes out of the closet, 2) non-shaming, supportive responses from family and friends that lead them through this psychic wilderness after the discovery, 3) development of therapeutic models that strengthen interventions for heterosexual partners and their children, and 4) improvement of public perceptions of the challenges of this experience for such families.

After years of her personal experience being misunderstood, Dr. Krome embarked on an ambitious research journey to create a more realistic portrayal of the straight spouse experience. Left in His Closet is a unique politically and morally charged novel that draws the reader into the heart of the debate and delves into the inner world of heterosexual spouses in the aftermath of the coming out.

Dr. Krome earned her Ph.D. from the University of Virginia, a Masters degree from Northwestern University's J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Business, and a Bachelors degree from Loyola University Chicago. She has won numerous awards for her research including the George Harvey Award for Outstanding Dissertation Thesis in the field of diversity, sponsored by SEI Center for Advanced Studies in Management, Wharton Graduate School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. She has also enjoyed numerous publishing and public speaking opportunities on the complexity/psychology of institutional change and the role of diversity and creativity during organizational transitions.

Working across genres, she has written a book of poetry, Shrinking into Greatness, and a stage play and song lyrics for Left in His Closet. She continues to address complex cotemporary issues as she works on her next novel.

Left in His Closet
Mary Krome

Book Review by Dr. Heath Sommer
February 13, 2010

As a phoenix is born from his own corpse
And his false image dies…

There is no honor in being alive
Unless in his closet they still reside.
(excerpts of a passage from Left In His Closet by Mary Krome)

Left In His Closet is one of the more genuine stories I have read in years. Sad, but sincere, this multi-perspective story shreds the invisible taboo of gay versus heterosexual philosophies into a brilliant and ingenious study of human philosophy, connection, sexuality, and identity. Mary Krome, the author, is a doctorate who has won awards for her research, which she brilliantly spins into the prose without it ever feeling like an academic lecture. This reviewer has a background in clinical psychology, and therefore it was easy to identify the sound research perspective and thoughts Krome spins into the web of human frailties recorded throughout Left In His Closet, but never once did I feel I was being talked at, but rather let into a privacy and undiscovered world that so few know.

Rephrased, I felt that Krome’s subtle poetry and soft-lit inner dialogues, mixed with a story really moved more by conversations than events in a way a pointillist painter might blend the blurriness of inane color dots, that seem hazy at first glance, but from far away form into a beautiful whole that is too easy to miss if one’s review of the art at hand values Polaroid over Picasso (yes, I know Picasso was not a pointillist, it’s a metaphor).

The point is that Krome sets out in Left in His Closet to do more than tell a story, she seeks out to bleed it into your own veins, merge it into your own thoughts, press it into your own vulnerabilities, and triumph it into your own hopes, and she achieves in a glorious way the untold story of the other spouse left in the closet when a gay lover wanders into a new life, and all without demonizing human beings in general along the way. This story will trouble you, move you, make you smile, make you frown, make you cry, but in the end, make you a better person for having suffered through the darker with the lighter parts of the human landscape. (February 13, 2010)

On the writing style:
Mainstream fiction, brilliantly written and softly guided. Krome is undoubtedly a fine artist including a great writer. She also mingles poetry throughout in a way that doesn’t feel foreign or surreal, as the poetry is written by a character who writes poetry, but the words highlight the points too easy to miss to the untrained reader.

On the target audience:
Women do appear to be a better fit for much of what is discussed, although there are scenes and storylines written for the male experience of the book’s message, so there is wide appeal to all who have loved and lost, and loved some more—or at least wanted to. However, the style screams to me that a woman who enjoys the gentle but direct analysis of life could curl up on a rainy day and explore herself and life more thoroughly with Krome as the host for a day.

On the best parts:
I think more than anything and consistent with the tenets of mainstream writing itself, Krome expertly connects people with people. If you do not feel the power of the human drama while reading this book, you may as well give up on reading altogether and spend your life doing something else!

Closing thoughts and overall summary:
An EXCELLENT read. Both for the lover of fiction, and the professor trying to get students to get life and not just research. I highly and thoroughly recommend this book, and look forward to the next from this new fiction author.

Heath Sommeris a clinical psychologist and author of Dating Within Marriage: The Role of Frequency, Attributions, and Communication and a novel, The Manufactured Identity

Mary Krome
Left in His Closet

After years of her personal experience being misunderstood, Dr. Mary Krome embarked on an ambitious research journey to create a more realistic portrayal of the straight spouse experience. Left in His Closet is a unique politically and morally charged novel that draws the reader into the heart of the debate and delves into the inner world of heterosexual spouses in the aftermath of the coming out.

I began writing when I could no longer ignore the books, movies and people who got the straight spouse experience wrong. Friends and family often whisper about what happened or ask questions that only a gay ex-husband can answer. Therapists miss the boat too as they draw upon therapeutic techniques more suited to heterosexual divorces and with logic associated with either/or sexual preference paradigms. Even literature falls short, focusing on the gay and lesbian experience, but not the parallel experience of straight people when their gay partners come out of the closet.

It's no wonder they get it wrong. Straight partners have been portrayed by people who are removed from or don't really understand their side of the story. To get it right, the story has to be told from the inside out by someone who knows the experience intimately.

As is the case in most divorces, straight partners experience varying degrees of loss depending on the closeness of their relationship. The difference is they have no grounding or rules of engagement with which to make sense of the experience. Most walk around in a daze at the beginning; unsure of what happened, what they lost or even had in the first place, what to make of the discovery and their life together, or how they should respond to it. These conflicting straight/gay realities shatter their identity and leave them feeling numb and powerless.

When straight partners discover the truth, there are more questions than answers. As their gay lover goes on with their lives, they are left behind to pick up the pieces with their own identity, integrity, and belief system in question. It is in these questions that the real story lies.


Three relationships patterns emerged from my research which I used to develop the main characters;
1. Ex known to be in the closet during the marriage - straight/gay relationships where the confusion occurs within the marriage and the couple stayed together, usually for the children.
2. Ex in the closet at end of marriage - strong heterosexual relationships during marriage, but one partner has latent tendencies that emerge along with some other identity crisis.
3. Ex bisexual during the marriage - Marriage has its ups and downs with homosexual behavior well hidden during the marriage.

In Left in His Closet, the coming out process is not limited to straight/gay partners. It is a family systems issue involving not only the gay/straight partner but also relationships of 1) children of gay/straight parents, 2) families of gay partner, and 3) families of straight partners.

With research completed, I had to decide on the genre. I did not want to write a self-help book or a memoir. I did not want to write about what happens between the couple during the marriage. I wanted to write a piece of fiction that mirrors the multifaceted experience of straight spouses in the aftermath of the coming out; one that addresses the identity confusion, conflicting emotions and family issues that arise as straight spouses are drawn into a political and moral debate about something they don't understand. This debate had to be included in the story because, as we saw in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, it's easy to have a strong opinion about anything when it isn't personal. But when it is your spouse, child, or sibling, the issue comes to life for us in ways we don't expect.

It didn't take long once I hunkered down. I wrote in layers. First, wrote a few chapters to get a feel for my characters. Then, I captured common themes and laid out an outline. To develop context, I thought of as many unique places and events I had been and determined which character was most likely to be in that situation. The last layer was added in the editing process where I used current events to capture time differences between the characters and events in the book.

The real work was not in the writing Left in His Closet but in the thought process that preceded it, involving my own self reflection and capturing the stories of other straight partners. The lengthy time lag was worth it. It created enough distance between my personal situation and that of the three characters in the book, each with a different set of circumstances, thereby making this work of fiction much richer than if it had been a memoir.