"Scorching ... a brave book." Helen Brown, Telegraph
"A thoughtful, engaging memoir...Theroux brings a journalist's eye to her marriage, writing with keen insight about Paul's affairs and her own, her experiences with his American family, her career as a radio producer...a sensitive account of a woman stepping into a complicated new freedom." Shelf Awareness
18TH JANUARY 1990
Paul left today at 8am.
We had been married just over 22 years. The previous evening we had gone out to eat at a local restaurant, where we drank champagne and reminisced. In a short story which he wrote about that final evening of a marriage, the central characters talk wittily and poignantly about the explorer Sir Richard Burton and the sad, misunderstood wife who burnt his books.
The reality was different.
'This memoir is based on the diary I kept during 1990, the year that my first marriage came to an end.'
After 22 years, spent across four continents, with two children - Louis and Marcel - in 1990 Anne and Paul Theroux decided to separate. For that year, Anne - later a professional relationship therapist herself - kept a diary, noting not only her day-to-day experiences as a busy freelance journalist and broadcaster, but the contrasts in her feelings between despairing grief and hope for a new future.
With reflections on truth and fiction, literature and art, and the nature of marriage, alongside commentary on notable political and cultural events, and interviews with prominent writers of the time, including Kingsley Amis and Barbara Cartland, The Year of the End offers a unique insight into the unraveling of a relationship and the attempt to rebuild a life.
Lead title: A previously unheard perspective of the partner of a great writer and a portrait of the end of a marriage, enriched by Anne's own insights as a couples therapist. A banner year: Explores the major shifts of 1990--the collapse of communism, the invasion of Kuwait, the ousting of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Addictively readable: Better than reading a diary, Anne Theroux takes on the year her marriage ended and the cheerful, or self-conscious, or simply rudimentary entries in her journal and fills the reader in on what was really happening. Emotionally rewarding: Anyone who has been through a break-up --especially after raising a family together--will appreciate the straightforward honesty, along with the twists and turns of emotions as Anne and her husband (th