Call it a gift! Mary-Louise Parker, who in her new memoir hints at the devastating aftermath of Billy Crudup leaving her — while she was seven-months pregnant — for Claire Danes, spoke about one telling chapter of the book during a Today show stop on Thursday, Nov. 12.
“I wanted to write something that was positive,” Parker, 51, said of her tome, Dear Mr. You. “To me, it was a bunch of thank you notes. My ruminations on the gender itself, and my love of things male and men in general . . . I’ve had amazing heroic men in my life starting with my father and my brother.”
While none of the 34 separate letters are addressed to Crudup, 47 — who left her in 2003 for his Stage Beauty costar Danes — she references his betrayal in “Dear Mr. Cabdriver.” At the time, Parker was single, pregnant, and en route to a doctor’s appointment when her NYC cabbie got lost.
“S–t, goddamn. I mean, why, I mean why the hell-NO! Where are you going now?” Parker yelled (as excerpted in her memoir). Her shouting got so bad, in fact, that the driver told Parker to get out of the car. “I don’t want you anymore,” he said to her. She replied: “No one does . . . Look at me . . . My life is worse than yours in this moment . . . I am alone. Look, see? I am pregnant and alone. It hurts to even breathe.”
During her live sit-down with Savannah Guthrie, the Weeds actress discussed that tumultuous period of her life, all without even mentioning her ex-partner by name. “I think it’s less about whatever was going on in my life, which is private to me, and will always remain so,” Parker said on Thursday.
“This was a complete stranger that met me at a very low moment,” the West Wing alum continued. “And had I been in touch with a higher self and been forgiving of him, it would’ve been heroic. But I was so attached to my own unhappiness that I was unable to sort of rise above feeling persecuted, and it just created this dynamic with this perfect stranger . . . and he held up a mirror at my face, he sort of haunted me because I didn’t consider him or his life.”
However, something beautiful came out of that dark time period: her son, William, now 11. “It was something that I had waited for all my life,” Parker said of motherhood, as detailed in her memoir. “I wanted a baby my whole life. I was a little girl who wanted that baby.”
Watch her honest discussion with Guthrie above!
