Linda Lee

Bio:

Linda Lee, Executive Editor

About my marriage: I said hello to a man in Central Park because I thought he lived in my building. We started dating. We took a trip to Europe together. We decided if we could stand two weeks together in a Deux Chevaux, we should get married. He was a criminal lawyer, and I was a book editor, and 23 years old.

About my split: It took only two years for me to realize I had married him for all of the wrong reasons. He made twice as much money as I did, and had, like me, gone to an Ivy League school. We had a great lifestyle, the Volvo, the rental in the Hamptons, the ski place in Vermont. But this man was not The One. I’d grabbed at a life vest when I was really looking for solid land.

He was a jock. I was a reader, gardener, cook. I went to museums. He went to basketball games. He was Jewish. I was not. The idea of having children never even occurred to us.

When we moved from Manhattan to Brooklyn to be close to his work, I felt like a prisonder. A marriage counselor told us there was no reason our marriage couldn’t succeed, if we wanted it to. But there just wasn’t enough in it to make me want to.

The Resolution: I gave him the apartment, the car, one of the dogs — everything, except a little piece of land we had bought Upstate. It took two years, however, for our divorce to be legal, because I had never taken his last name, and the clerk refused to file divorce papers for a man and wife who didn’t have the same last name.

Times change.

I met a man I truly loved, had his child. When this man died, and our son was a year old, I wrote the memoir “Out of Wedlock, A Love Story.” So I have found (and lost) real love. And I raised a son, by myself.

Eventually I found myself as a writer (six books on a variety of subjects, the last being “Success Without College"). I was an editor at The New York Times for many years, became an expert on film, art, design and architecture. I wrote a lot for the Sunday Styles section. I started a design magazine in Miami, and edited the official Art Basel Miami Beach magazine. And I have a web site that covers Art Basel: www.MA2Dweek.com

I’ve found happiness and peace. It’s taken a long time. And I am thrilled to be working on First Wives World.