Breakup: The End of a Love Story [Paperback]

Catherine Texier (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 17, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

Shortly after the author returned from a trip to France, the country of her birth, she discovered that her husband of 18 years and the father of their two daughters wanted to leave her. Texier, a novelist (Love Me Tender) who co-edited with her husband, Joel Rose, Between C and D, a lower Manhattan literary journal, publishes here the diary she kept in 1996, the final year of their marriage. Artfully written and candid in its anguish, her memoir describes the harrowing months when she tried to change Rose's mind by maintaining their sex life, cooking for him and restraining her rage at his betrayal. Although she discovered that he had been having a 15-month-long affair with the woman he wanted to leave her for, Texier continued to hope that the memories of the good years they had shared would be powerful enough to keep them together. It was only after Rose took his lover on a trip to Los Angeles that the author finally told him to leave their home. Men and women alike will respond to Texier's re-creation of her feelings of depression, anger, jealousy and erotic longing that accompanied the dissolution of her marriage. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 176 pages
• Publisher: Anchor; 1st Anchor Books ed edition (August 17, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385495234
• ISBN-13: 978-0385495233
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.2 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (39 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,247,353 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Should be required reading for anyone who is married, October 8, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Breakup (Hardcover)

... or even considering it. I had read Texier's fiction years ago and found it only so-so. Whatever she was trying to get across about sex and human passion, major themes in her novels, never came across in a way to make me feel anything for the characters. But this memoir made me feel everything -- the passion, the pain, all that was at stake. I inhaled it, rather too quickly, perhaps, and it sank into my soul and left my nerves feeling bruised. Anyone who has been through a crisis (and not even particularly this kind of crisis) in a long term, deeply felt relationship, or even witnessed it in their parents' marriage or that of a close friend, will recognize the essential truths so well and precisely articulated here. Unlike other reviewers, I didn't mind the rawness, or the repetitiveness. It was necessary to see the wearing away of her dignity. It takes a while to say good-bye to twenty years of your life, and there is always that suspense of, will the situation reverse itself? I've known married couple who weathered multiple infidelities and a three year seperation and wind up happy grandparents together in the end. Americans are often in denial about matters of the heart, still clinging to absolutes -- total fidelity, happily-ever-after stories, despite that pesky one in two divorce statistic and the 70% infidelity rate. Texier's baring of her soul has been succor to several divorced women I know, and should be an antidote for all young women subject to the Cinderella propaganda still being broadcast through Julia Roberts movies and limp women's fiction. What intrigued me were the updated dynamics which I've also noticed everywhere in real life -- in the end, a man leaves not for a better blow job, but for money, or the illusion that success is obtainable through a relationship with a more influential woman. No longer do men want the little woman at home, taking care of the domestic front. Any emotional dependency is likewise anathema. As Texier reported, when she "cocooned" at home with her children, her husband rejected her. When he felt she was a has-been as a writer, he went on to someone he perceived to be a success. Well, it's rather ironic that this memoir has become Texier's pot of gold, professionally, and that Rose's "big" novel launched by his new editor/lover sank without a whisper of either sales or critical praise. Bravo Catherine! Perhaps it was she who needed to dump Joel Rose in order to get her literary star back on the rise. This breakup clearly invigorated her writing. It think memoir is her true metier, and that she has much more to tell about her unconventional upbringing and life. I look forward to her next work.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars nobody wins--but Joel's really the loser, April 14, 2000

By 

Renate Lewin - See all my reviews

This review is from: Breakup: The End of a Love Story (Paperback)

Many of the reviews comment on Ms. Texier's histrionic extremes. Hey, she's French. The bottom line is she was dumped, after two children and 20 years. And her husband still came home to her, right after servicing his mistress. Who wouldn't go a little crazy? Being in the middle of a divorce/mistress/dumping/betrayal/20+ scene myself, I found Ms. Texier's work at least brutally honest. It reassured me that divorce is, indeed, CRAZY TIME. If you attempt to sugar coat it, or gentle it with dumb social responses ("Well, it just didn't work for a long time and we both decided to move on with our lives..." and other socially acceptable platitudes), you lose the disorienting reality that divorce is. Nobody wins. French, sexy, cosmopolitan? Suburban, overweight, buried in PTA issues? It makes no difference. The men walk when they want to. The women are left to figure it out. Thank you, Catherine, for your passion and determination to NOT be proper and censored.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A MUST READ FOR DIVORCED WOMEN WITH A (?) 3RD PARTY INVOLVED, May 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Breakup: The End of a Love Story (Paperback)

I know it sounds cynical, but any abandoned woman with chidren, espcially, who feels there may have been a third party involved needs to read this book. it is so close to the bone that some may find it uncomfortable, but for me it was like finding out I am not the 0nly one who--despite better judgement but becasue of leftover passion and abiding love for one who is not worthy -- slept with my soon to be ex, tried to fight for my marriage/ and also, for anyone who has had a long term passionate relationship which hid the skids. I equate it with inexpensive (and comeplling, page-turning and entertaining) therapy for the (admittedly damaged) soul who blames themselves for trying to keep the family together despite insurmountable odds and for joel? a midlife crisis of a vain (aren't they all) creative man. do read it and cry when you emphasize with this valient woman's baring of her soul. brava to ms texier.....