My First Wife

"Yes, it has an interesting publication history in English translation—Michael Hofmann identified a part of a much larger work that he chose to translate and advocated publishing as a stand-alone work. Obviously I haven’t read the entire work, so I can’t judge with much authority, but it certainly feels successful as a stand-alone work. I suppose for contemporary readers it might have been a little like reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle . I read it more or less as a straight piece of fiction, in part because I think however much a writer is writing about his or her own life, the process of writing is itself a pretty fierce form of fictionalization. Having said that, the sheer amount of legal detail feels particularly true and particularly lived—to me, the legal proceedings are the most harrowing part of the collapse of the marriage. That’s kind! I read My Marriage in a state of transfixed horror—and returning to your earlier question, it’s hard to deny that the horror is amplified by knowing that it’s autobiographical. It’s a novel that doesn’t really rely on plot, but that sustains tension throughout, primarily through the close observation of the narrator. One thing I was interested in thinking about in writing this book are how we rely on roles and the performance of these roles, in order to maintain the cohesion of our identity—certainly socially, but also personally. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter My narrator doesn’t have recourse to those roles—she’s neither wife nor ex-wife nor widow exactly. That precipitates a kind of crisis. I think one of the most insidious things about the wife in My Marriage is the way she uses the symbolic power of the title ‘wife’ against her husband."