It happened so early in the season. It must have been jarring.

CR: You're just coming back, you're getting your sea legs, like, OK, I've got to gear up for this again! Had I known she wasn't going to bring up her process of hiring a writer to work with, had I known she wasn't going to bring that on camera, I never would have asked if she had hired the writer. At that moment when I said, "Have you hired the writer?" I fully thought she was going to do scenes with her. So when she said, "No, I did it alone," in my stomach, I said, Oh, shit. I never thought she would go as far as she did.

Throughout the season, Aviva either said she wrote her book herself or "it takes a village." But her book was ghostwritten by a woman named Valerie Frankel. Why is that a bad thing?

CR: It's industry standard. She signed a deal, she had to turn that book around quickly. They peg it to the show. It's what every other Housewife does. And it's great. It's great for publishing, it's good for writers. It just never occurred to me that she wasn't going to be honest about that.

I imagine that one of the frightening things about being on a reality show is that people can just say anything.

CR: I know, Kate. I know! And I don't have skeletons in my closet, I don't have things I can't talk about. But I realized after that, Oh, you can just make it up. I remember after that scene going to the producers and saying, "Well, that was drama, but it's not true. The publisher didn't pass, and Bill Whitworth is an editor." He was my copy editor, which is a phenomenal insult to him to even say that, because he's one of the most respected editors. It's just that he didn't come on until the very end of What Remains. I remember saying to the producers, "That's not true." And they looked at me, like, We don't care about the truth. It was this stupid "Aha!" moment.

When something like that does happen, which is upsetting and potentially damaging, what do you do? Do you call Andy Cohen?

CR: The ironic thing is that the next morning at 10 a.m., I was at a wedding with Andy; a mutual friend was getting married. I was in a rage! I'm really good with Andy, because we do travel in the same social circles, and I've never — it's like a Chinese Wall. Because I can be very passionate about things, especially about work, and I do regard the show as work. I don't like to get into conversations with him about it, because he is the executive in charge of Bravo, and there's a professionalism that has to exist. Neither of us wants to talk about the show when we're at weddings. But I broke my rule.

Tell me more.

CR: I think he had heard about it. And he knew I was upset about it. He was very smart, though. He said, "Rely on the intelligence of the audience, Carole." I was, like, "I can't do that! That's slander! And this is insane!" And you know what? He was right.

Right.

CR: But there were calls to lawyers.

There were?

CR: There were people who were saying, "Why don't you sue?" It's not an easy answer. There were several reasons. One is we sign contracts, so we can't sue each other. So you'd have to break the Bravo contract.

So all these Housewives who are always threatening to sue other Housewives, they can't actually sue?

CR: They can if they break the contract. But at the end of the day, I'm a single, working girl. I'm not going to take on Bravo. And more than that, she implicated my publishing house. Her publishing house is my publishing house. I'm a freelance writer, I'm not going to take on Simon & Schuster. She also implicated colleagues of mine that I didn't want to drag into a lawsuit. That was a big part of it. And you start filing lawsuits, you get all enmeshed. I wanted less to do with Aviva, not more. I didn't want to go down that rabbit hole. I didn't want to send a cease-and-desist letter. Because then it becomes part of the story.

Right.

CR: And now, a year later, I have much more compassion. And I can see how people will gossip. It was just the extent to which she went for it that was unfortunate. I felt like she left me no wiggle room to even have a reconciliation or some something. I only spoke to her one other time after that, on the beach. And again, she was incredibly condescending. When someone says to you when they're holding up your galley, "Job well done!" Honey, unless you're Ann Patchett or Mary Karr, or you've morphed yourself into Joyce Carol Oates, you can't tell me, "Job well done." It was incredibly condescending. There was no apology. And then that was it. I thought there would be another opportunity when we went away on the trips to have something, some interaction. But then after that, I never really saw her. She didn't go on any of the three trips we took. So we didn't have a natural, organic way to interact.

It does seem that being able to have perspective and compassion is great, but obviously it's something that would bother a person. From Twitter and your blog, it has seemed like it's been a constant irritation.

CR: We don't get into it that much on Twitter. I think I tweeted at her directly after the first episode where she was saying things that weren't true. There's a dark side to her. Her language: We "verbally raped" her. She recently said I was "demonic." She continues to be condescending and insulting about my friends and family on social media. Even a year later, she doesn't miss an opportunity to say something either condescending or insulting or downright nasty about me. And I'm not gonna do that. I'm not going to stoop to that level.