The Year My Marriage Ended
Anne Theroux’s marriage to her husband, the writer Paul Theroux, ended in 1990 after 22 years, an event he wrote about in his books. Anne, a journalist and relationship therapist, now tells her story in The Year of The End, based on the diary she kept that year.
That summer Paul had published a book called My Secret History, a novel, drawing on our life together, and I was wounded by it. Although there were things about the character based on me which I liked and accepted, Jenny Parent had other qualities which I hated: she was shrewish and humourless. The portrayal diminished me.
I was also upset by the descriptions of Andre Parent’s affair with a woman called Eden. In real life this woman was an English teacher from Pennsylvania with whom Paul had had two affairs, one in 1982 and one in 1986. These affairs, unlike previous ones, had been serious: he considered leaving me, hesitating, sulking and making me unhappy and insecure. Both had eventually ended, after much misery, and I had learned to suppress the mad, jealous questions with which I had once bombarded him.
The book, cruelly, teased me with answers which may or may not have been fictional. Had he really taken her on one of his trips to India? Had he really …?
“It’s a novel,” said Paul. “It isn’t true.”
The previous year, when I read the book in manuscript, I blue-pencilled certain passages and added phrases in other places, most of which he ignored. I wasn’t altogether surprised; some of the additions were written in facetious rage, for instance, “She was wearing big baggy bloomers” in a scene where the hero undressed his lover. Now that the book had been published, and received good reviews, I had decided that the only way to deal with my discomfort was to go along with Paul’s insistence that the whole thing was a work of fiction, which of course it was, in a way. Friends would telephone and ask, “How did you feel about Paul’s book?”
“I think it’s a wonderful book.”
There would be a pause. This wasn’t the answer they expected. How the conversation continued depended on the degree of their insensitivity, animosity, or nosiness.
“But the wife is such a horrible character,” said one old friend. “Not at all like you, of course.”
“I quite like the wife. But it’s all made up. It’s a novel.”
It was hard for those friends who genuinely wanted to sympathise, to say the right thing; there was no right thing to say. The book was a betrayal.
““Yes. But it isn’t serious. I told her,” he said with some pride, as if he expected me to be pleased, “that this had happened before, and that when I had to choose, I chose you.””
The trip to Martha’s Vineyard, barbecues with Paul’s family (after more than 20 years they were my family, too), a visit to Florida including a tour of Ernest Hemingway’s house (I have a photo of Paul in Papa’s WC), even the prospect of [our son] Marcel joining us in a week or two, could not silence the voice shouting in my head: “No. This is too much.”
One day Paul received a letter from a friend saying what a fine book My Secret History was, but how difficult its publication must be for me. He showed me the letter and for the first time seemed to want to know how I felt.
“It is very hard,” I said. “Sometimes I feel unhappy and afraid about the future.”
I hoped for reassurance.
“Sit down,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to tell you something.”
I knew what that meant. We’d been there before. I said it first.
“There’s someone else.”
There was a long pause and the sound of wild horses exerting their best effort.
“Yes. But it isn’t serious. I told her,” he said with some pride, as if he expected me to be pleased, “that this had happened before, and that when I had to choose, I chose you.”
“So it’s not her again?”
“No.”
“So who is it?”
“Why do you need to know?”
“Did you tell her you loved her?”
“I may have done. But it wasn’t true.”
The mad, jealous questions and evasive answers began again. Much of what he told me then, later turned out to be untrue.
Feeling that I had been punched hard on an old wound, I went and sat in the toilet to be alone.
Later that day we drove to Boston to meet Marcel’s flight. Neither of us spoke for over an hour. As we entered the airport parking lot, he said, with a pathetic attempt at lightness, “Are you wishing that you’d had an affair too?”
“No. I’m not wishing that. I was thinking that this probably really is the end.”
As he got out of the jeep he was crying.
Extract from The Year of the End: A Memoir of Marriage, Truth and Fiction by Anne Theroux (Icon Books, $24.99)