Last week celebrity couple Neil Gaiman and Amanda Palmer announced they were calling it quits after over a decade of marriage. The news came as a shock, but that was nothing compared to what happened Saturday, when someone on Twitter posted screenshots of what seemed to be a truly sick burn from Gaiman to his soon-to-be-ex: His Goodreads suddenly said he was currently reading a book about how to split from someone with “borderline or narcissistic personality disorder.” A mere handful of hours later, Gaiman — who tends to be calmer and more cutting with his public tussles — claimed he was simply hacked.
Still, there was still a good stretch of the day in which social media addicts at least assumed it the first public throwdown in what could be a nasty divorce. The book in question was Randi Kreger and Bill Eddy’s Splitting: Protecting Yourself While Divorcing Someone With Borderline Or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, and one eagle-eyed follower on social media’s most popular reading site noticed it had prime real estate in the comics legend’s bedside reading pile.
https://twitter.com/elbusyo/status/1259162516598345728
To some, it seemed like legit shade, especially as Palmer announced their split on, of all places, her Patreon page. Of course, it might have seemed a stretch that the creator of Sandman, Good Omens and American Gods could be that vindictive. And it seems like he wasn’t: As per The A.V. Club Gaiman quickly updated his Goodreads page, eliminating the Kreger-Eddy tome, and adding a quick note, painting it as untrue. “Whoa,” Gaiman wrote. “Someone with a dark sense of humour just hacked this account. (I suppose that’s what I get for leaving it here and not doing anything for a long time.)”
So there you have it. The A.V. Club leaves open the possibility that Gaiman simply backed off of a really, comically nasty joke, but it’s worth noting his Goodreads page is more of an author’s page, with no mention of what good reads he is indeed reading. Does this mean we’re spared a brutal public famous people divorce? What would Morpheus do? He probably wouldn’t start a flame war with an ex over social media, that’s what.
(Via The A.V. Club)