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Random freezes, missing sound and display glitches usually trace back to one bad driver. Find and replace yours safely.Free scan · under a minuteIn a first-person essay published by The Cut in December 2024, psychologist Lilly Jay described caring for her infant son while confronting what she called “the sudden public downfall of my marriage.” Her account focused less on the details of the relationship than on the experience of having a private crisis become public—while she was a new mother and trying to preserve privacy in her professional life.
What Jay said about the public attention
Jay’s essay, titled “How Does My Divorce Make You Feel?”, was her first widely reported public account of the divorce. The Los Angeles Times reported on December 20, 2024, that the essay had appeared the previous Thursday. The Times said Jay did not name Slater or Ariana Grande in the essay, and that she offered little detail about their relationship.
Instead, Jay wrote about the abrupt shift from a largely private life to one exposed to public attention. “This, I tell myself, is nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide,” she wrote, as quoted by the Times. She also reflected that “maybe it’s time to accept that I’m not unknown anymore.”
Motherhood, divorce and the life she had planned
As the Times summarized Jay’s essay, she was caring for an infant while trying to come to terms with the marriage’s end. Jay recalled moving to another country with their two-month-old child to support her husband’s career. At the time, she wrote, she did not understand the growing distance between them.
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Slater filed for divorce in July 2023, and the couple finalized it in September 2024, according to the Times. Jay described facing the loss of the future she had expected with her high-school sweetheart, but also a gradual change in perspective: “Slowly but surely, I have come to believe that in the absence of the life I planned with my high-school sweetheart, a lifetime of sweetness is waiting for me and my child.”
Why public visibility affected her work
Jay is a psychologist, and the sudden attention meant that people who knew her through her professional life—including therapy patients—could see a window into her private experience. The Times reported that she connected her own experience with a lesson she shares in her work: “I can start hearing myself when I tell patients that avoidance maintains fear,” she wrote.
Jay also considered what a breakup leaves behind beyond the relationship itself: “Some of what you loved most about your partner was actually your own goodness reflected back to you; it’s yours to keep and carry forward.” Her essay’s emphasis was on living through exposure and rebuilding, not on making a public case against either Slater or Grande.
What Jay said about co-parenting
Contemporaneous coverage reported that Jay and Slater remained committed to co-parenting their son. Hindustan Times quoted Jay as saying that both parents “fiercely love our son 100 percent of the time,” regardless of how parenting time is divided.
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What the essay does—and does not—establish
Jay’s essay, as described in the Times’ coverage, is a personal account of divorce, new motherhood and unwanted visibility. It does not provide a detailed account of the couple’s relationship or set out a confirmed chronology of events involving Slater and Grande. Claims about blame or disputed tabloid timelines should not be treated as Jay’s own statements on the basis of this essay.
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