Wayne Scott’s debut memoir, The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined, (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) tells the unlikely love story of a distraught couple with three school-aged children who, on their way to get a divorce, completely surprise themselves when they fall in love again. The book’s title references a line from the poem “XIII,” from Adrienne Rich’s collection of Twenty-One Love Poems: “. . . whatever we do together is pure invention / the maps they gave us were out of date / by years.” Scott’s memoir is a tender, unflinching look at the imperfect relationships inside of modern families.
Scott’s writing has appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, The Millions, The Oregonian, and The University of Chicago Magazine, among others. He writes regularly for Psychotherapy Networker. In 2020, Scott’s essay “Two Open Marriages in One Small Room” was published in the New York Times’ Modern Love section and adapted for the podcast in the summer of 2021.
I spoke with Scott via Google Meet, where we talked about sexual identity, falling in love with your spouse, and redefining marriage outside of the heteronormative binary.
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The Rumpus: Tell me about your relationship to Adrienne Rich’s writing and how it’s influenced your work?
Wayne Scott: I encountered Adrienne Rich in a feminist theory class at the University of Chicago in 1984. There were only two men in the class, both gay identified. It was the first class on feminism that had ever been taught at the University of Chicago and hugely controversial. Adrienne Rich was among the authors we read and it was the first time I’d read her essay, “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Those themes opened this whole portal for thinking about how aspects of sexuality and sexual identity are constructed. Right around that time is also when I met the girlfriend who would become my wife.
Rumpus: Your wife, Eva, one of the major characters in your book?
Scott: Yes, Eva took the same class a year later. We ran in the same sort of feminist circles. We volunteered for the student crisis hotline. She was my best friend’s close friend, and that’s how we met, the old-fashioned way.
Rumpus: In the book, you reference the TV show Will and Grace and describe Eva as “the straight feminist” and yourself as, “the queer man who fell in love with her.” There’s a compartmentalizing of who you are to each other. In one of the wedding flashback scenes, you ask, “Would the compartments last? . . . Would the compartments be your undoing?” When did the compartments, the labels, start to feel too tight?
Scott: When me and Eva got together, the word “queer” did not exist in the way that it does now. It was not this kind of umbrella term for the whole LGBTQ+ community. It was mostly just pejorative. Back then, even the word bisexual was suspect, an identity people thought of as transitional on a journey to gayness. So really all I had to work with were the facts, which were essentially that I was a gay man who behaved bisexually. That’s how I made sense of who I was. So, when I referred to myself early on as a queer man who fell in love with a straight woman, it was a little bit anachronistic because the word queer wasn’t used that way at that time, and we didn’t have good precise language for talking about sexual identity then.
Now what we have is a more encompassing language to talk about lots of experiences of sexuality. That creates a lot more space for understanding that it might not be fair or healthy for a bisexual man to lop off a whole part of himself to fit into a heteronormative container that really was just handed to us. It wasn’t something we were asked to critically evaluate, which we can at least do now.
Rumpus: In the chapter “The Night Grace Paley Died,” which is really a turning point in your marriage, you come home from a run and Eva has discovered, essentially, solicitations you’ve sent out for sex with men. She tells you to leave your home, but you later tell your mom, “I still want to be married. . . .” but not “in the narrow sense” that you’d been suffering with. What was too narrow? What were the parts about marriage you loved?
Scott: When a long-term partnership between two people, who grow to know each other deeply, when that works out, it can be a deeply healing thing for both people. As a therapist, I feel like everybody who comes into any relationship has some kind of brokenness that they’re dragging along with them. I think a good marriage, or a good partnership of any sort, provides a possibility of some kind of healing and the people in the relationship heal or find it together. When I decided that I wanted to be with Eva forever, it was in our couple’s counselor’s office, and we were on the couch having this extremely painful conversation. We were really grappling with the guts of who we were and how it kind of interfered with each other’s sense of self sometimes. I was realizing I don’t actually ever want to have to do this with anybody else again. I can’t imagine getting to this depth with anyone else, or wanting to, because it’s hard and painful to really truly see each other in your brokenness and your vulnerability while not getting defensive or reactive. We were able to do that with each other and still are, and I think that deep friendship was what kept us both committed, ultimately, to the marriage.
Rumpus: I really like this thing that you say about how there were certain parts of the relationship that interfered with who you are or who you want to be in the world. I imagine that is probably true in heteronormative relationships and gay relationships and queer relationships and all kinds of relationships on the friend-family spectrum. It also makes me wonder if part of the work of evolving in a relationship is figuring out how much interference one can put up with?
Scott: Sure, and as a bisexual, queer-identified man in a heterosexual relationship, there’s also other people’s perceptions of me basically as heterosexual. In the beginning of our relationship, I’d talk about being queer a lot, but as time passed and then we had children, it became increasingly difficult to figure out where it fit in the conversation. I’d find myself mostly hanging out with the parents of my kids’ friends because those are the easiest people to hang out with. And it kept not coming up. So, increasingly, over time, I had this experience of that part of me not only being kind of compartmentalized but not being seen at all. There was this sense that I had sort of unwittingly slipped into this way of “passing” in the world. If I didn’t bring it up, everybody assumed I was straight. I didn’t know how to explain who I was, and what we had done in getting married, without raising eyebrows or judgment. At times, that straight-passing privilege was also enjoyable and safe. I grew up as a very queer acting boy getting bullied in school, so it was nice, for a little while, not to have to deal with that as an adult man, dragging three children around in a minivan. We were in Chicago for eleven years, doing our undergrad and graduate programs, and now we have been in Portland for twenty-plus years.
Rumpus: Do those two cities have different relationships to queerness?
Scott: We would not have survived as a couple if we had not been on the West Coast. Portland is so quirky, progressive. Everybody’s doing weird, alternative, pushing the boundary kinds of things. So it wasn’t long after Eva and I decided to open and do this kind of creative marital experiment, where we met other people [who were] also in poly or open relationships. Then, we didn’t feel very original, actually.
In fairness to Chicago, we lived there smack dab in the darkest middle of the AIDS pandemic. So the way people talked about sexual identity was probably as polarized and adversarial as it could be. It was gay men and lesbians against the rest of the world.
Rumpus: We’re living in a Trump world again, back to a cancel culture, queer-policing type of state. Do the waves of progress ever feel confusing?
Scott: Yeah, it is iterative and evolving, and we are going into another dark period, and we can’t predict what it’s going to look like on the other side. We also can’t predict what we’re going to learn from this and the ways it’s going to expand us and compel us to grow. You can look back at the AIDS pandemic for proof. That was a horribly dark time. The government was completely and utterly neglectful of anybody that came down with AIDS. But when you’re in the experience then, just like the experience we’re in now, we don’t know the things that are happening that are going to help us.
We don’t know all the different people who are working now to make things better for the future, but history would suggest that they’re there. We just haven’t seen them yet.
Rumpus: The structure of your book is separated into three different parts: (i) Shifting Tectonic Plates, (ii) Avalanche, (iii) Mountain Up, Close. What was at play in the naming of these sections? How does Mount Hood, specifically, and the greater Portland landscape inform and inspire and reflect the evolution of your marriage?
Scott: Everyone who lives in the [greater] Portland area has a relationship with the Cascade Range. In Portland, that relationship is most intimate with Mount Hood. So for the structure—the shifting tectonic plates, the first section, is about the historical forces that shaped us. For Eva, that was third-wave feminism. For me, it was very much the AIDS pandemic and how that was shaping gay men’s experiences in the world. And then section two—the avalanche—was the crisis when it all came crashing down on us in our marriage. The marriage could’ve suffocated us. The beautiful thing is after the avalanche there’s always some kind of rebuilding—the fact that mountains, even though they stand serene and still, exist as a result of all these global geographic events. They aren’t the immovable permanent entities we imagine them to be. They change and have changed as a result of many violent accidents. There’s a metaphor for marriage there. Like in my book, Eva and I spend most of the chapters pretty angry and distraught, but we can’t quite get rid of each other yet. Devotion rules out the hard parts, enough to push them to do really hard things for each other to make the marriage work.
Rumpus: You lead us, as readers, to understand that you and Eva start off with different versions of the same story but ultimately create a shared narrative. Where does this idea of a common story come from? Why do you think that was so important?
Scott: The first task that divorce mediators will give a distraught couple—even when they’re wanting to separate their assets, decide custody, all that kind of stuff—is to come up with a common story. Come up with some kind of compassionate story that makes sense of how you started, and how you got to this point of transition. It’s actually considered the best practice in the field of divorce mediation, and [it is] practiced internationally. So it wasn’t even a suggestion. Our divorce mediator just gave it to us as a thing to do together because that’s the first thing you give to couples that say they want a divorce.
The idea of the common story got these wheels running in my head about what makes a good story and what makes a good marriage. Those two thematic questions kind of blended together as we figured out and decided what the story of our marriage was. The most important thing to remember is that there is never just one story. Every marriage is multiple marriages strung together like a pearl necklace over time. I believe that if we can just recognize that every couple of years or so, we have to redesign our marriage to make the marriage fit who we’ve changed and become . . . and to see if we still fit together.
Rumpus: How long have you and your wife been married?
Scott: We have been married thirty-two years, but we have been together for thirty-seven years. What is funny is that when our children left home, everybody thought we were going to leave each other. It was so wild. Even though we had told our friends and family the reasons why we were working on this, a different kind of partnership, people still thought we were only staying together for the kids. But why would we leave each other now? We’ve achieved something in raising these great kids. We have more room in the house. We like to vacation together. The most important thing about the common story is it has to contain elements of the narrative that you both agree on.
Rumpus: And what was the common story for you both?
Scott: So we both knew when we got married that she was a straight, feminist woman, who was very uncomfortable with traditionally heterosexual men, and I was a queer-identifying man who had a very strong interest in women’s bodies and women’s emotionality. That was another big thing we had together—an ability to connect. I had never experienced this with any of the men I went out with.
Rumpus: At one point, the couple’s counselor asks you if you’ve considered having an open marriage, which shocks both of you. How did you negotiate opening your marriage?
Scott: Couples counselors we saw early in our relationship operated on a “monogamous only” paradigm. Some therapists outright told us either that nonmonogamous marriages never worked, or they were too difficult, or they were somehow pathological. Linné, the therapist in the book, said matter of factly, “Of course it can work if you want it to work. You get to decide, not some expert who’s the arbiter of normal.” Negotiating an open arrangement, in my experience at least, is painful! Even when you’ve logically and collaboratively decided to do it, in your very cells you feel like you’re doing something wrong and shameful. There’s a lot of social conditioning to bust through, at least in our generation.
Rumpus: How did your partner feel about you writing about such a difficult, tenuous time in your marriage?
Scott: Well, to be honest, she wasn’t thrilled. What spouse would be? But she is used to living with an artist who writes memoir, so she knows it comes with the territory. She also believes that our creative marital arrangement was a hopeful story worth sharing. When she said yes to my writing Maps, she just said, “Make it beautiful.”
Rumpus: That’s so sweet. How did falling back in love with your partner feel in your body?
Scott: Falling in love for the first time is like the first draft of a short story you’re writing— messy and exciting and full of possibilities. “Re-falling in love” when you’ve been together fourteen years, and you’re having a marital crisis, and you think you’re going to divorce, is like revising a long novel for the tenth time, after working on it for years, and you’re not sure you’re going to finish it, and then you find some image or some new depth of a character that unlocks exciting new possibilities, and you realize you want to keep going. Re-falling in love isn’t as effortless and takes a bit of perseverance.
Rumpus: As a psychotherapist in Portland, do you see reverberations of your story around you?
Scott: Probably I have a skewed perspective. Ever since my Modern Love essay appeared in 2020, a lot of the clients who’ve come to me have wanted to explore nonmonogamous possibilities, so it often looks like everyone here is nonmonogamous. That’s obviously not true, but Portland, Oregon, does have a very progressive, open-minded social vibe. I don’t think we would have been as successful if we had been in a different city.
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Author photograph courtesy of Wayne Scott
