Read Jonathan Safran Foer awkwardly email-flirting with Natalie Portman

Although we are months away from my birthday, the universe has nevertheless decided to give me a gift. Because I woke up this morning to find that the New York Times’s T Magazine has published a lengthy email correspondence between Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, and Natalie Portman.

The piece is ostensibly a high-concept profile intended to promote Portman’s directorial debut — her movie A Tale of Love and Darkness premiered at the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival and will open in US theaters later this year — but that’s not why everyone’s clicking. They’re clicking because of those rumors. The ones about how Foer left his wife for Portman.

Portman has apparently been a fan of Foer’s since he published his first novel, Everything Is Illuminated, in 2002, and they began an email correspondence not long afterward. When Foer published his case against eating meat, Eating Animals, Portman wrote an op-ed for the Huffington Post about how the book convinced her to become a vegan. She signed on to produce a documentary based on the book. And somewhere along the way, per the rumors carefully outlined by A.J. Daulerio at Ratter, Foer decided that he and Portman were in love.

​According to Daulerio, Foer told his wife, the acclaimed novelist Nicole Krauss, that he was in love with a beautiful, intellectual movie star. He did not check with Portman to find out if she was on the same page but more or less took it as fact that of course they were meant to be. He and Krauss divorced.

But Portman, who is married to her Black Swan co-star Benjamin Millepied, had no interest in ending her own marriage to run away with Foer. When he finally approached her, the story goes, she told him so.

None of this sordid backstory is mentioned in the T Magazine emails, which are mostly limited to musings on guinea pigs and melancholy of a specifically Jewish nature. But as the Cut points out, they are the kind of emails “that one might pen if one wanted to convince a very famous and beautiful actress to leave her husband for you,” which is to say, performatively intellectual and intense.

It may seem like a sad story, but personally I aspire to achieve the level of unearned romantic confidence that allows me to just assume that a famous and famously good-looking movie star obviously would want to end her marriage to be with me. It certainly seems to have worked out all right for Foer, who is currently dating Michelle Williams.