Jennifer Wright on ‘It Ended Badly,’ her book about breakups

“I like to write about things that keep me awake at night,” says Jennifer Wright, who confesses to some bad late nights over failed romances in the introduction to “It Ended Badly: 13 of the Worst Breakups in History” (Henry Holt, $21). Anyone cringing over maudlin texts they’ve sent their ex can take comfort in Wright’s dish on the far more extreme behavior of historical figures like Henry VIII (who executed two wives) or Caroline Lamb (who sent former lover Lord Byron a bloodstained hunk of hair . . . not from her head). Though Wright covers sex and dating for the New York Observer and the New York Post, this book had more personal origins, as she explained in a recent phone conversation.

You write that one of your breakup cures is reading historical biographies. Did they give you the idea for this book?

There were definitely facts I got from those biographies that I’d been sharing forever with friends who had terrible breakups. They would talk about some awful thing they had done, and I would point out, “You know, [artist] Oskar Kokoschka built a life-size, sex-doll replica of Alma Mahler and then decapitated it!” I think there are so many relationship books out there that tell you how to behave well during a breakup, and we all know what they suggest. But when you wake up and realize that you drunk-dialed your ex last night, those books don’t make you feel much better. I wanted to write a book for anyone going through a breakup who did things that were embarrassing; they can read this and feel like they’re in very good company.

It’s surprising that you would dedicated a book about breakups to your grandmother.

She’s thrilled! She’s 90, and she’s coming down for the book party. She worked at the Winnipeg Free Press 65 years ago, and she’s so excited for me. My parents are wonderfully supportive, but my grandmother was the person who made me love reading and got me interested in history and writing. I couldn’t imagine not dedicating my first book to her.

The book is very funny, in a baroque sort of way, with bizarre facts like Lucrezia Borgia being declared a virgin when she was pregnant. Were you the kind of kid who was always cracking up her classmates?

Oh, no, I was very shy. I’m much more comfortable when I’m writing than I ever am at parties. I was a bookish, awkward kid, and when you’re like that, one of the things you like to do is daydream about what you’re reading: “Wouldn’t this be a wonderful person to know? Wouldn’t it be cool if I could be friends with Eleanor of Aquitaine?”

Do you have a favorite character or weird incident?

Gosh, there are so many! One of my favorites is John Ruskin [whose wife sued for divorce claiming he was impotent] saying, “I can prove my virility at once” and telling people that he masturbated. That was different! And everything about Emperor Nero is totally bizarre. What also gave me a great deal of pleasure in writing the book was the people who were so great they would do just fine if transplanted to today. Eleanor of Aquitaine would be running a company within three months. Oscar Wilde would have his own talk show, and he would be thrilled.

Your least favorite character is clearly Norman Mailer.

There seems to have been a period between 1950 and 1975 when we let creative men get away with doing a lot of terrible things to women. At least William Burroughs, who shot his wife in the head while playing William Tell, seems to have spent the rest of his life trying to figure out how this could have happened. Norman Mailer stabbed his wife and went on a talk show the next morning! [Adele Morales Mailer survived and didn’t press charges.]He seemed to think this was just some regrettable thing that happened, but it didn’t really bother him. He went on with his life and wrote a book about someone killing their wife and having a liberating experience as a result. That baffles me, and it seems like he got a free pass from everyone about it.

What next? “It Started Badly,” about first dates?

Actually, I sold my second book a few months ago, and I’m working on it right now. Its called “Get Well Soon: The 13 Worst Plagues in History.”