“All of a sudden I felt, ‘This is how I’m supposed to feel,’ ” he said. “Susan and I spent years trying to figure it out and trying to work it out together, and at the end I felt I had no choice. Claiming your life for yourself feels like a huge deal until you do it. I feel like myself now, and I’m happier. It’s had no effect on my professional life whatsoever. Nobody cares. In the end, Gawker always moves on to the next story.”

To publishing insiders, Jude’s identity is no mystery: he’s Bill Clegg, a literary agent whose own book, “Portrait of an Addict as a Young Man,” a memoir of alcohol, meth and crack addiction, came out in 2010. (Mr. Clegg, who is also said to be the inspiration for “Keep the Lights On,” a movie by his former boyfriend, Ira Sachs, declined to be interviewed about his connection to Mr. Galassi’s book.) That he and Mr. Galassi might have been involved heated up the literary gossip wires in the summer of 2007, not so much because someone’s coming out of the closet was still news but because of Mr. Clegg’s bad-boy reputation, and because Mr. Galassi is the straightest of straight arrows.

Mr. Galassi said that Tom was not a publishing figure — his relationships after Mr. Clegg have been of less interest to the gossip sites — and that he currently isn’t involved with anyone in particular.

Mr. Galassi is not a night owl or a swashbuckler. He’s an old-fashioned publisher, the kind with the habits and temperament of a scholar and the wardrobe of a banker. He took over the helm of Farrar, Straus from Roger Straus, a company founder and his mentor. He may be the last person in publishing to have worn a suit and tie to work every day, and lately, having given up the tie, he still looks like a prep school English teacher.

“Jon is a true man of letters, or maybe these days we should say person of letters,” said Scott Turow, whose best-selling thriller “Presumed Innocent” was one of Mr. Galassi’s early acquisitions at Farrar, Straus. Mr. Turow added that Mr. Galassi had discussed the changes in his life with him, and that though he sympathized with the pain that attends any middle-aged divorce, nothing else in their relationship had changed.

“My first reaction was, in all honesty, ‘So what? What difference does it make?’ ” he said.

Michael Cunningham, another of Mr. Galassi’s authors, whose latest novel, “By Nightfall,” happens to be about a 40-ish married man who falls in love with his wife’s younger brother, said of Mr. Galassi: “He’s one of the last survivors of what we think of as the old school of editors. He actually edits. You can send him a messy, half-finished manuscript and he’ll read it and talk to you about it. You know that he’s actually thinking about your book.”