Book Makes Public the Pain of Lost Love

How could such a good marriage go bad? How could a unique couple become so cliche? Catherine Texier was out of answers two years ago, as her marriage unraveled. She began to make nightly entries in a diary. “It was either that or stick my head in an oven,” she later told a reporter. Neither the writing nor the unraveling stopped.

When the breakup of Texier and her husband became public, New York’s literary world relished the gossip. Juicy tidbits appeared in the papers. “We were known; my husband, myself, his new woman.”

Texier and Joel Rose had been married for 18 years. Separately, each wrote novels. Together, they had created the hottest little literary magazine of the 1980s.

Their home turf, Manhattan’s scruffy Lower East Side, was Bohemia to the uptown set. In fact their lives had the aura of Italian opera--a crazy-quilt combo of poverty, passion and creation.

Their magazine, Between C and D, was produced on an old PC, and distributed on neatly folded computer paper with holes down both sides. It was wrapped in glassine bags--a reference to the drug packets so ubiquitous in their neighborhood.

The couple’s breakup was of particular interest to the book world because the strapping Rose, who favored bikers’ leather and frazzled hair, had left his petite, French-born soul mate for a more conventional (and younger) woman--the editor at Crown Books who was working with him on his new novel.

Unbeknownst to all the gossips, however, Texier turned her diary into a book. One that would make much more noise. It was eventually titled “Break-Up: The End of a Love Story” (Doubleday, 1998). And it divulged in searing detail more than anyone needed to know about decomposing love.

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In Los Angeles to promote the memoir, Texier flits about her West Hollywood hotel room like some exotic bird--a small-boned woman, body-wrapped in black jersey leggings and zebra-striped top. Even with no makeup, she looks girlish for a woman of 51.

The divorce became final in November, she says. “I am ready to get on with my life.” Ironically, she has made that difficult. There is this book, this minute dissection of what she had thought was the world’s most solid, lifelong love. As she watched it dissolve, she says, she became two people: “One person was powerless and humiliated, the other one was the writer, who had control.”

So every day, as her husband came and went, as he hopped into bed and turned his back on her, or held her and loved her and then left to deceive her, as the children wept and complained and became confused--every day, Texier wrote the specifics of what had just occurred. Not only the insults, arguments but the feelings of rage, lust, hope, doubt and, most often, disbelief.

The book’s stripped-bare prose (it is addressed to “you,” as if she is writing to her husband) doesn’t mention names, locations or outside players. It features the man, his wife, their kids, his mistress.

Some days, she wonders if it should have been printed as fiction, she says. In France, it may be published that way--”to lend distance.” She considers it a work of literature. But the older of her two daughters, now 17, considers it an embarrassment, Texier says.

“It’s hard for her to have her parents’ intimate relationship discussed so much. I apologized to her that it is so public.”

It is also ugly.

A New York Times writer took Texier to lunch, and the resultant, glowing profile was headlined: “Revenge for a Broken Marriage.” New York magazine’s review, less charitable, said the book had the “stilted posturing hysteria of a Plath-immersed sophomore’s secret diary.”

After months of indecision, during which Rose could not bring himself to leave, and Texier was still too much in love to banish him, the breaking point came: Texier learned that he’d taken their younger daughter to meet his new love without first telling her; then he asked his wife’s advice on what to pack for a trip to Los Angeles he was making with his girlfriend. “Move out today,” she said. He moved to the other woman’s apartment, where the children now visit him with their mother’s blessings.

All of which brings up certain ethical issues: Did she risk causing pain to her daughters by writing so intimately about what happened, including sexual details? Was she concerned about causing embarrassment to her ex-husband, which would heighten the enmity between them, possibly forcing the children to feel they must take sides?

“That has all happened to some extent,” Texier admits. “But I think it will work out in the end. At first, I felt cast in the role of abandoned wife, like an old sock that needs replacing. I refused to play that role. I wanted to tell my version. It was about taking power, refusing to be reduced to a cliche.”

There were so many things about the relationship that were not cliches, she says. Physically, the two remained attuned for 18 years, even during the worst days of the breakup. “I guess that wasn’t enough,” she says with a shrug. But she is not sorry she spent the time with him. “I would do it again, spend those same years, with never a regret. Even knowing how it would end. We did love each other very much. . . .

“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.”