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Some breakups go badly; others are blessedly civil.

Now, in a time when almost every aspect of modern life is played out on the Internet, breakups have gone viral.

Last week, the popular New York-based media gossip site Gawker published an e-mail from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Robert Olen Butler to five of his graduate students at Florida State University. In it, the 62-year-old described the end of his 12-year marriage to 44-year-old writer Elizabeth Dewberry, who had left him for communications magnate Ted Turner.

"I want to tell the full and nuanced story ... and ask that you clarify the issues for any of your fellow grad students who ask," he wrote. "This sort of thing can get wildly distorted pretty quickly."

Mr. Butler then told his students Ms. Dewberry had been molested by her grandfather, had a troubled relationship with her previous husband, and lived in the constant shadow of his Pulitzer.

"It is very common for a woman to be drawn to men who remind them of their childhood abusers," he wrote while stressing that Mr. Turner "... is far from being abusive."

The bizarre, intensely personal e-mail also alleged that Ms. Dewberry would not be "Ted's only girlfriend."

"You need not keep this to yourself," he concluded, "since I am not up to the task of telling this story over and over."

Mr. Butler is not the only recently single individual to use e-mail or another Internet forum to explain his side of a bad breakup. Blogs, social networking pages and group missives have all been used to detail what went wrong to a wide, and sometimes stunned, audience.

There is even an online service called BreakUps Inc. that offers a public breakup announcement service for $49.95 (U.S.). The fee covers the publication of a notice in a local classified section and an e-mail to friends.

"Let them, and everyone else, know it is over," the company suggests.

Danah Boyd, a PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, researched the phenomenon of young people breaking up publicly on the social networking site MySpace.

"The heartbreaker is attempting to assert their view," she wrote in a paper on the topic. "Mutual friends are often the complicating factor during a breakup, prompting an all-too-problematic view that these friends must choose sides."

People of all ages have begun spreading their versions of breakup battles to friends through group e-mails, and some tech-savvy friends are even taking it upon themselves to encourage splits, using Facebook groups or online petitions to urge a couple to end their relationship.

"In order to preserve human decency, and to create an atmosphere of harmony and joy throughout [our high school], the following crusaders for righteousness insist that Jacob ... and Tanna ... cease all relation-related activities and separate," reads one online petition signed by 17 people. "Sincerely, The Undersigned."

Even private breakup moments can easily find a wider audience thanks to e-mail forward buttons and gossip websites.

When pop tart Britney Spears dumped her husband Kevin Federline via text message, the moment was captured by MuchMusic cameras and broadcast ad nauseam around the world.

The website Jezebel.com runs a recurring feature called Crap Email From a Dude, printing verbatim letters from insensitive former boyfriends, dates or husbands.

But perhaps the most famous public breakup was exposed as a fake earlier this year. In February, a video posted on YouTube captured the supposed public split of two University of North Carolina students.

The video showed senior Ryan Burke dumping his girlfriend Mindy Moorman in front of a large crowd after having a choir serenade her with the Dixie Chicks song Not Ready to Make Nice.

The couple said afterward that they planned the hoax to demonstrate the power of Internet communities.