My friend H. sent me a story: “Quarantined Husband Shocked To Discover He Has Been Married To Age-Appropriate Woman This Whole Time.” The husband in question—Chuck Donnelley—is starting divorce proceedings. “I’ve never been more embarrassed in my life,” he said:  “I’m not sure what to tell the boys at the country club. I can’t believe my wife was nearly 50 years old.” 

As reported in the Toronto Harold satirical piece, Donnelley’s wife’s lips have deflated, her forehead is showing lines, and Mr. Donnelley began finding lone grey hairs on her pillow. Men are not the only ones concerned about the transformation of their wives during this pandemic. Women are also having a rough go of it without their routine maintenance. “Without access to my botox treatments, I am very concerned I will begin showing my disgust towards my husband on my face instead of just internalizing all of it,” said one wife.

It’s a tricky time in marriages. I too have had no choice but to go grey. My roots are inching towards the two-inch mark. My colorist did text me: “Would you consider buying colour from the salon?” I couldn’t tell whether this was a serious message or a joke. I’ve never coloured my own hair (and she bloody-well knows this). Is the middle of a pandemic (depressing enough as this is) really the best time for a hair disaster? In the meantime, I look like crap. In addition to grey roots, the only motivation for exercise I have right now is stirring cookie dough batter. I am about to discover whether my husband is a “Mr. Donnelley” or a more evolved unconditional love kind of guy. I’d say it’s 50:50 at best. 

In other news, last night I pressed “send” on my last MFA submission. What fun I had most of the time. I learned a lot about the craft of writing and made friends for life. Most of the program was focused on our book project but we had other assignments too such as book reports. In case you are looking for more things to read, I’ve pasted my book report on Catherine Texier’s “Breakup” below. The end of her marriage had nothing to do with going grey.

I hope you and your families are well. Sending (virtual) hugs.

Book Review: Breakup

My husband and I recently celebrated our 30^th wedding anniversary. I marked the occasion by binge-reading books by middle-aged women about the end of their marriage. This isn’t entirely surprising—my therapist believes I suffer from “foreboding joy” (dress rehearsing tragedy because I can’t tolerate happiness). My happily married husband looked askance at the growing pile on my bedside table—Suzanne Finnamore’s Split, Catherine Millett’s Jealousy, Susan Gregory Thomas’s In Spite of Everything. It was Catherine Texier’s Breakup though that best illustrated how a hot love between intellectual, sexual and co-parenting soulmates can turn to dust.

Texier was one-half of a NYC literary power couple until she wasn’t. Her ex-husband is author Joel Rose (she does not mention him by name in Breakup) with whom she founded the avant-garde (now defunct) literary magazine Between C & D which published the works of up-and-coming authors. She and Rose have two daughters. Rose is now re-married (with two sons) to the “other woman.” She is Karen Rinaldi, his editor at the time (she gave him a six-figure advance for his novel about a doomed love affair—not based on his own, apparently) and current publisher of Harper Wave. 

Born and raised in France, Texier is now in her early 70s. She is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Award and two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships. She has been published in The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Marie-Claire and other prominent places. Her latest book (she has six in total) is Russian Lessons. Published in 2015, it is about a divorcee writer who hooks up with a younger man—although fiction, I suspect it’s partly true given her revelations about dating a younger man (post separation) in the final pages of  Breakup. Since her last book Texier is MIA on the social media front, with the exception of Instagram (a few hundred followers). Her handle is “unevagabonde” (French for “a nomad”). Her recent photos are from Menerbes, in the south of France, not a bad place to wander. She will be wandering back to NYC soon, though. She is slated to teach creative writing at The New School next spring.

Breakup, published in 1998 (Doubleday), is Texier’s account of the end of her eighteen-year marriage to Rose. There are five chapters, each a distinct phase in the denouement of her relationship. The memoir starts in September 1996, after her return from a trip to France with her children.  Her husband unexpectedly announces he doesn’t love her and if it wasn’t for the children, he would not stay. “But why? What happened?” she asks. 

The answer is found in the next chapter. “LOWLIFE! MOTHERFUCKER! TRAITOR,” it begins. Rose is having an affair, something Texier discovered after snooping through his receipts and finding ones from expensive hotels (despite their precarious financial situation).

Texier continues to ask questions throughout the book, trying to make sense of her husband’s motivation for leaving given all that is at stake—their family, their sexual chemistry (surprising to me, despite his affair, they remain sexually on fire until he leaves for good), their almost twenty-year history—and how she can win him back. Her memoir is based on the diary she kept during this time of turmoil. She writes in the present tense, a day-by-day, blow-by-blow account of their interactions and her vacillating feelings—anger, hope, fear, despair, resignation, to name a few. She writes directly to her husband: “Your words sink into my gut like a death toll,” she says after he tells her (for the umpteenth time), “I’m leaving.” 

In the fifth and final chapter Texier reaches her limit after her husband returns from a trip with his mistress: “The LA trip was the last straw for me,” she writes. “Five percent of good stuff, sex and a little tenderness. The rest is pure torture.”

Breakup is a jarring but exquisite tell-all of Texier’s separation. It was published only a year after Rose left to live permanently with his mistress. Narrative distance? There is none. This is raw, undigested material. The story unfolds in real time, her inner dialogue and fantasies laid bare on the page: “Her, the concubine, I would take with a gun, a .38 aimed straight at her cunt ….” This differentiates Texier’s book from the other books I binge-read around my milestone anniversary. In those, the authors’ emotions have been muted with time, their perspective more objective. I suspect Texier would have written a very different book if she had let the words from her journal ferment. Two years after the publication of Breakup, she tells a reporter: “I realize now that the atmosphere was claustrophobic for us both in the end. It began so beautifully, and lasted so long. But in the end, we both needed to come up for fresh air.” 

It is precisely because Texier did not give herself the time and space to reflect that is the genius of Breakup. She has no filters. It seems she shares everything. Texier has defended her tell-all in numerous interviews, including with The New York Times: ”I became two people. One person was powerless and humiliated. The other one was the writer who had control over the story.” 

I question the ethics of this (the separation is after all not just her story, but her husband’s too) and I wonder whether a publisher today would run the risk of being sued for slander as we live in a more litigious environment than when Breakup was published (Texier’s husband allegedly threatens to kill her, during one argument, forcing her to barricade herself in her office). As a mother, I cringe that she dedicated the book to her daughters (her eldest was 17 when Breakup was published). How on earth does she expect them to receive passages such “… you started to play with my nipples while you were eating me, sucking me off till I came into your mouth with deep grunts ….”  Their own lives, including their petty betrayals (the youngest daughter told Texier how “nice” the mistress is, after the mistress combed her hair and gave her presents) are there in perpetuity.

Ethics, legal concerns, and parenting judgments aside, Breakup made me appreciate that my sense of “foreboding joy” in my own happy marriage is not baseless. Texier’s account is a stark example of how even the best marriages are not impenetrable from external forces. If I even had an ounce of smug complacency before, it has been smacked right out of me. That’s not a bad thing of course. Paying closer attention to our partner’s shifting needs and desires so they can be accommodated within the marriage is a good lesson for any long-term couple.

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