In the spring of 2010, I wrote “Negroni Season,” a personal essay about an alcoholic boyfriend, as part of an ongoing series for the Awl called “The Worst Boyfriend in the World.” It started as a kind of in-joke between me and a close friend, one who happened to witness many years of my life with the Boyfriend and who subsequently became a cofounder of the nascent website. I penned it under the name Evelyn Everlady because I didn’t want the Boyfriend, a terribly private and vaguely vindictive person, to see it. (And, even if I had no idea whether anyone would read it, I had a dim sense that I also wouldn’t come off looking particularly good either.)
The events of the essay took place in 2005. I was not yet 30 years old, but I remember feeling very grown up—after all, I was living with a man (!) and we did all sorts of adult-y things: dinner parties and farmers’ markets and family visits and Christmas trees. We even jointly purchased a sturdy midcentury Danish dining-room table. What else was there?
Today, no one believes me, but I swear to you—Negronis were just not a thing in 2005. As a society, we were still crawling out of the chokehold of the Sex and the City cosmo reign and were facing down the alarming rise of appletinis.
By the time “Negroni Season” came out, the characteristically bitter drink (invented by an Italian aristocrat at a bar in Florence in 1919) had gotten a teensy bit more familiar. But certainly, what I, my friends, and various Italian liqueur makers couldn’t have seen coming was what happened after the essay was published. Nothing I’d written had ever been shared and cited and disseminated so widely. There were so many strangers ready to weigh in on my dumb life choices! And you wouldn’t believe how many people wrote in to say that the very same thing happened to them. I found this astonishing.
Maybe there was something more universal than I realized about the uneasiness Britney Spears describes of being “not a girl, not yet a woman.” Or maybe, despite the specific details in “Negroni Season,” people just identified with the very exquisite pain of first love lost. But whatever it was—and I will die on this hill—it wasn’t because of the cocktail.
Nevertheless, within a year of its being published, I couldn’t escape Negronis. I was equally bewildered and offended. People started using the phrase “Negroni Season” as hospitality branding. (There is no consensus on when the season actually takes place because, you know, I made it up.) The bearded intellectuals I liked to hang about with all seemed to switch from old-fashioneds to Negronis. Now, they’re as much a menu staple as any other basic bitchery—and even worse, there are so many (disgusting sounding) varieties. A cursory glance at N.Y.C. cocktail menus reveals such horrors as the Fruit Cake Negroni and the Coconut Negroni.
But there are good ones, too—even if they do nothing for me. At Dante in Greenwich Village, you can take home Negroni Sessions, four pre-batched variations on the theme. The Sbagliato, invented accidentally in 1972 and given a boost thanks to that viral video of actor Emma D’Arcy from 2022, means “bungled Negroni.” This very magazine once endorsed something called an Autumn Negroni, which adds Fernet-Branca and Cynar. People make them with bourbon, rum, and even mezcal. (Do these still count as Negronis, you ask? Who cares!) My own mother ordered a nonalcoholic Phony Negroni at lunch last week.
People often ask me why I wrote the essay. Because I was too poor for therapy at the time? Because Nora Ephron’s Heartburn made me think there’s power in taking back the narrative reins of one’s own sorrow? I have no idea anymore. I’m sure somewhere in there was the knowledge of how much the Boyfriend would hate that it exists. But does it matter? History has decreed the Negroni will outlive the anguish.
Speaking of the Boyfriend: He is now someone else’s husband and apparently doing well. We wish each other happy birthday and occasionally heart each other’s Instagram stories. As for me, I’ve found a tall and very kind man who ensures I steer clear of anything that makes me sick or sad. I haven’t had a single Negroni in the past 21 years. Sometimes I regret writing the essay, sometimes I regret not putting my real name on it. But mostly, I’m just bummed out I never figured out a way to monetize Negroni Season.
