Thanks for reading and responding, Kaia.

It’s true — there’s no way to know just what she meant and it’s hard to know what’s real and not when we’re dealing with celebrities (whom we pay way to much attention to, if you ask me). Still, “I can promise for the sake of our marriage that I will never do this again” is a curious way to say she doesn’t like writing or that it was tough for her. She’s been working on it for years and, as she told Vogue two years ago, “We say this time we’ll finish the book, but our husbands are skeptics,” Clooney says. “They’ve heard that before.”

It could have been overwhelming — it’s 1,000 pages! — and it might have been an unhappy experience. And she indeed may never want to do that again. But I would hope she would say she didn’t want to write a book again because it was hard and unpleasant — “I’m proud of it but it was exhausting and I don’t think I’d want to do that again.” There’s no reason to even bring her marriage into that conversation.