Breakup: The End of a Love Story - Softcover

Texier, Catherine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0385495234 ISBN 13: 9780385495233

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1999

Synopsis

I will never forgive you.
I will never make love with you again.
I do not love you anymore.

Breakup is the erotically charged chronicle of the tempestuous final months of an eighteen-year romantic and literary partnership, self-destructing in the aftermath of the ultimate betrayal. Fearlessly and courageously, Texier chronicles the end of that love as it is wrecked by infidelity and deceit in a literary tour de force reminiscent by turns of Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller.

Texier writes in harrowing detail about the powerful sexual relationship she shared with her husband even during their breakup, how sex between them became a substitute for real intimacy, and how the fabric of a marriage (a shared cup of café au lait on a yellow table every morning, the memories of giving birth to two glorious daughters, of coediting their own literary magazine) is brutally dissolved.

Breakup is unsentimental and unflinching, a journal of love's exquisite torture. Every emotion, including rage, disgust, self-pity, hatred, sympathy, and jealousy, is mined. Heartbreaking, too, is the effect of the breakup on Texier's two children who, sometimes caught in the crossfire of their parents' turmoil, are trapped as the relationship spirals out of control and their once-secure home becomes a battlefield.

Ultimately, Breakup is about the risks one great passion involves. It is a journey of the heart in all its wild beating; a courageous diary of a soul laid bare, and the redemptive power of love.

About this title

Review:

When Joel Rose left his wife, Catherine Texier, and the East Village to move in uptown with an editor at Crown Books--which had just paid him $105,000 for his new novel--their acrimonious split was the talk of literary New York. Reading Texier's present-tense account of their final months together is like watching a train wreck in progress. Emotions are volatile, behavior is bad, each nasty skirmish in the marital war is reported in excruciating detail apparently unmitigated by editing. She plunges readers into the thick of things with pungent prose that displays, despite the fact that she's French-born, her impressive grasp of Anglo-Saxon expletives--though idiosyncratic words such as "competitivity" give the text a faintly foreign flavor. Her soon-to-be-ex-husband, once a champion of alternative literature, comes across as a climber who wants mainstream success and big bucks as much as he wants to end the marriage--indeed, his reluctance to actually pack up and move out suggests that what he'd really like is to have his cake and eat it too. Yet the narrative also provides ample support for Rose's contention that his wife is emotionally needy and self-centered. (She notes, but never really grapples with, the impact of their vicious quarreling on their two daughters.) Do we need the graphic particulars of the couple's sex life, still "hot" even as their relationship lurches toward auto-destruct? Probably not, but Texier's willingness to tell all certainly makes this an engrossing example of the memoir-as-reprisal. --Wendy Smith

From the Publisher:

"I found myself gasping, raging and plummeting right alongside her....Catherine Texier tells a horrifying story here, beautifully and rivetingly."
--Francisco Goldman, author of The Ordinary Seaman

"By turns, disturbing, exhilarating, mesmerizing and always utterly impossible to put down."
--Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird and Crooked Little Heart

"The surprise in Texier's recollection of the end is her generosity of spirit, her...attempts to understand and empathize with the man who is betraying her and to even imagine the position of the...other woman. "
--Elizabeth Wurtzel, author of Prozac Nation and Bitch

"Texier's book/diary of betrayal is an open, emotional account of our deepest fears as women, as lovers, and, ultimately, as humans."
--Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face

About this edition

• Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0385495234
• ISBN 13: 9780385495233
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176