Split lit: Divorce, and the ream deferred

A memoir often takes one of two basic forms: In the first, the writer has an extraordinary story to tell; in the second, she has the ability to tell the common story in an extraordinary way.

Sometimes - Mary McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood is an example, Paula Fox's Borrowed Finery another - the two are conflated in events on whose extremity the artistic mind succeeds in imposing literary form.

I once heard the writer Aharon Appelfeld, asked why he had underplayed the savagery of his Holocaust childhood in one of his books, answer that extremity, whether imaginary or real, is harmful to art. What he perhaps meant was that the artist's aim is to represent truth, and that certain experiences - those that infringe or violate the common sense of reality - can never be made to seem true.

Joan Didion dealt interestingly with this problem in The Year of Magical Thinking, making the surreality of her husband's death at the dinner table a space the reader could philosophically inhabit.

Leaving Before the Rains Comeis Alexandra Fuller's account of the collapse of her marriage. Divorce is both ordinary and extreme. For many people it represents their most intense experience of unreality, yet it occurs at the most intimately humdrum level of life. Moreover, divorce is a kind of anti-story: It is the spectacle of narrative breaking down, both personally and publicly. Narrative works by agreement, and the whole point about divorce is that it represents the end of agreement. In divorce the story of life is deemed unfit to continue because the participants cannot agree on a common truth. The truth has to be broken in two; there now have to be two truths, two stories, two versions.

Onlookers are often forced to take sides, for the reason that it is impossible to believe in two stories at once. And thus a problem arises, which is that before we've begun to read the memoir of divorce, we are convinced what we are reading is only half the truth.

The newly divorced require a sympathetic listener; people who won't challenge their "version". For the writer this requirement would be fatal, as would the notion that others are entitled to tell their "side of the story", despite the fact that those others are not usually writers. By the time the reader has got to the bottom of the first page, the defences of literary form and of authorial privilege have already been hopelessly breached.

Fuller is sensitive to these pitfalls, while being unable to avoid at least some of them. She quotes Jung: "Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate."

She describes with admirable accuracy how this coming to consciousness entails the breaking of pre-existing structures: "In the end, at least in this end, the world beyond me and the world that was inside me could no longer exist in the same place and I broke. And yet at the same time, I felt I was in the process of becoming two people - the person I had been, and the person I was becoming."

Fuller's "story" of divorce is ordinary enough: She and her American husband, after three children, two decades of marriage and a long, grinding process of decline, cease to live together.

"I chose to believe in the possibility of a predictable, chartable future," she writes, "and I had picked a life that I imagined would have certainties, safety nets and assurances.

"What I did not know then is that the assurances I needed couldn't be had. I did not know that for the things that unhorse you, for the things that wreck you, for the things that toy with your internal tide - against those things, there is no conventional guard."

Jung's understanding of the often destructive crisis of midlife as something that arises from an inability to believe any longer in the "reality" bequeathed by formative experience, and especially by one's parents, underpins Fuller's narrative of divorce in much the same way it does many people's.

Much of Leaving Before the Rains Come concerns itself with the familial histories of both Fuller and her husband. Consequently, the book is longer and more diverting than it ought to be, while at the same time the incompatibility of these two narratives creates a sense of uneasiness at its core.

"Once, elbow deep in bubbles at the children's bath time, I suddenly found myself praying in a kind of panic that nothing would ever change. 'It never has to get better than this,' I remember thinking. 'We can do this forever. Just like this.' But the mere fact of my thinking it was a kind of acknowledgement that this couldn't last, neither the equitable moment of our marriage nor the shaky American dream in which it had been conceived. Because seen in a certain light, that promising dream has a depressing, thrill-ride quality about it, hurdy-gurdy with brightness, loud and distracting."

Such moments of honesty are the more heart-rending for the feeling that one is watching the author still imprisoned in the sources of her pain: "I believed in what I was doing. I just no longer believed in the person who was doing it."

"For the first time," Fuller writes, "I was beginning to see that for a woman to speak her mind in any clear, unassailable, unapologetic way, she must first possess it."

Fuller is far from depleted: This book perhaps marks the beginning of her journey towards an unassailable possession of mind, and towards a new kind of freedom. - © The New York Times

"Leaving Before the Rains Come" is published by Penguin.