Sandra Tsing Loh: Stealing Wireless and Making Us Feel Good

Never, ever, has anyone been punished for an affair quite the way Sandra Tsing Loh has: She's living in her car! Really! OK, not really, but so she tells us, mock pitifully, in her piece in this month's Atlantic. And to be honest, I was happy to get the update.

What do I care? After all, this is a woman so narcissistic that she wrote last summer that if her marriage hadn't lasted, then perhaps the whole institution was doomed, and good riddance. Is her purpose to make not living in our cars seem like some kind of achievement? Maybe; schadenfreude happens. But she's also just so juicily provocative – asking a lot of good, hard questions about the nature of modern partnerships before fizzily dissolving in alternating spasms of self-flagellation and self-pity; Juliette Binoche should totally get the part. (Hmm, and they're almost the same age; move over, Ellen Chenoweth.)

Here she is, explaining why forever is way too long: "The very success of the modern American family -- where kids get punctually to SAT-tutoring classes, the mortgage gets paid, the second-story remodel stays on budget -- surely depends on spouses' not being in love.''

And now she's back to do for motherhood what she did for marriage: "I am a bad mother. I am bad not in that fluttery, anxious, 21st-century way educated middle-class mothers consider themselves 'failures' because they snap when they are tired, because they occasionally feed their kids McNuggets, because as they journal they soulfully question whether they're mindfully attaining a proper daily work/life balance. No, I am bad because after a domestic partnership of 20 years, when my kids were still elementary-school-age, I fell in love, had an affair, admitted it, and quite deservedly got tossed out of the house on my ass. Currently between homes (my earthly belongings reside in a 10-by-10-foot windowless U-Haul storage unit whilst I alternately house-sit, pool-sit, and cat-sit), I furtively park at the curb of my former home for an extra few minutes after dropping my kids off and, with my laptop, I steal wireless.''

Her argument this time around is that if she's a bad mother, who needs mothers anyway?

Of course she's offensive, boo-hooing over the completely predictable reaction to her earlier piece: "Because our gypsy children seem okay, because I'd been honest about my shortcomings as a wife and mother, because we are more than 40 years after Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, I'd thought mine was a sad but not atypical tale to cite in The Atlantic as a jumping-off point for a discussion about the state of modern American marriage, but . . . No!!! Oh, the shock, the outrage, the vitriol, the tying to the bumpers of and being dragged behind blogs large and small all across our fair nation!''

I mean, lots of Americans really are living in their cars, and not just pretending to do so in some weird gesture of exhibitionistic atonement. Yet I'm also curious about why we as a culture are so judgmental; is that mostly jealousy talking?