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The Oscar for realism goes to...
BROWSE THE
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sob sister
BY LAURA MILLER | They lurk in the back of closets, the bottoms of drawers, packed away in boxes in rented storage spaces, in basements and attics. These battered, tear-stained notebooks are the confessionals of despised love, where the betrayed and the dumped scribble pages of their obsessive meditations on what went wrong and their delusional hopes that it can still be made right. If you've ever filled one of these notebooks on the way to Getting Over It, you've also probably considered burning the thing. God forbid you should die and your survivors find it: Who wants to be remembered as such a shattered, pathetic mess? And even if you never committed your maunderings to paper, chances are there's a sympathetic friend somewhere who took a lot of long, late-night phone calls and could really embarrass you if he or she pulled a Linda Tripp. Bet you never considered publishing it, though. That's because you're not Catherine Texier, a minor Downtown novelist ("Panic Blood") and former co-editor of the East Village literary magazine Between C&D, whose chronicle of the dissolution of her 18-year marriage to Joel Rose, another minor Downtown novelist ("Kill Kill Faster Faster"), will be published in August by Doubleday. Galleys are currently making the rounds to the snooping interest of New York's literati. Rose, who had been having an affair with his editor at Crown Books, Karen Rinaldi, for over a year, eventually left Texier and their two daughters last year. Rinaldi is now pregnant with his third child. Texier's book is likely to resurrect more complaints about the literary world's current penchant for exhibitionistic memoirs, complaints that have died down since last spring, when Kathryn Harrison's memoir, "The Kiss," relating the affair she had (as an adult) with her own father, made a thousand commentaries bloom. Although Texier's material isn't anywhere near as sensational as Harrison's -- her story, however painful, is fairly run-of-the-mill -- she lavishes on it all the Sturm und Drang that Harrison's terse little remembrance eschewed. Texier's fervid account includes several explicit passages describing the sex she continued to enjoy with Rose after he confessed his affair, and she even throws in some pornographically violent fantasies of revenge against Rinaldi for good measure. Mostly, however, "Breakup: The End of a Love Story" is a series of journal entries, the day-by-day broodings of a woman in shock at the discovery that the relationship around which she'd built her life has vanished. It's repetitive, with most passages falling into one of the following categories: protestations ("There's a pulse between us, primal ... We'll always be lovers, don't you know"); groveling ("If you want to leave, you're going to have to make the decision by yourself. The truth is I can't bear the idea of you leaving"); hollow defiance ("Fuck your compassion. I don't want your pity. If it wasn't for the kids, I would leave too, spit in your face, how dare you"); brave little nostrums ("It's not about you leaving or staying. It's about learning how to depend on my own self. It's about growing up without you") or paralysis ("You will have to make a choice, but maybe I can live with it until you make up your mind"). Texier's suffering is real, and merits compassion, but these writings ought never to have been published. They're the kind of scrawlings that provide release in the thick of misery, but they're devoid of perspective, insight or understanding -- anything that could transform raw agony into art. Furthermore, they're humiliating, but the melodramatic, pose-striking self-portrait that Texier inadvertently sketches here doesn't suggest a woman with enough humor or self-possession to grasp how badly she's coming across. Not that Rose -- a petulant, waffling middle-aged fellow given to bad boy affectations (who is forever stalking off to ride his motorcycle) and whose chief interest in any woman seems to be how "important" she makes him feel -- looks any better. It's not long before the reader begins to wonder just how magical their "love story" ever was. The unrelieved banality of "Breakup" begs a question: Is the publishing world so gossip-mad that inside dish on the personal life of glamorous Rinaldi is enough to result in a book contract? That could well be, but Doubleday is probably also betting on regular readers' growing romanticization of the writer's life. With a very few alterations, "Breakup" could easily be the story of two accountants splitting up, but then it would hardly have the same appeal. "We had the relationship that everyone dreams of," Texier laments, meaning that she and Rose embodied a fantasy of la vie boheme, two hipster writers in their East Village apartment tapping away on their novels, reading each other's pages and putting out a little magazine. It's an urban version of the marriage between Louise Erdrich and the late Michael Dorris, which also turned out to be something of a Potemkin Village. Readers love to believe in this kind of fairy tale, and they seem to love to watch it get blown apart even more. At the same time that we, as readers, want writers to act out our exciting dream image of the creative life, we also increasingly seek out works that mirror our own lives back to us. I don't mean the dazzling kind of identification that drew most of us to literature to begin with: the sense of having our understanding of life expanded beyond the boundaries of our small selves. Instead, there's a growing population of readers who just want to see their bad childhood, their cold mother, their twisted relationships, their own traumas reflected in the books they read, as faithfully as possible. They want a photo on the book jacket of an author (usually a woman), beautiful and hollow-cheeked and haunted looking, who confirms that their own misfortunes have made them fascinating and deep.
Texier and Rose seem to have spent their lives trying to fulfill various
cheesy images of literary coolness. The publication of Texier's utterly
ordinary heartbreak notebook indicates her publisher's faith that these
artsy trappings alone can make an unremarkable story compelling. It may be
narcissistic of Texier to expect anyone to care about her woeful jottings,
but in a way, she's also betting on the self-absorption of the average
American memoir reader as well. That seems like far less of a long shot.
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