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I know, from my own experience, that people can recover from things. And I can’t see the end of a marriage as the end of a life. ‘Life goes on,’ says R. ‘It must go on. It can’t stop.’ ‘And it can’t go back?’ I say. ‘No,’ she says, ‘it can’t go back.’ In a blighted cafe in Rozelle V and I share a s…

Biographies in which artists change wives without apparent outrage or destruction (because the tale is told from the artist’s point of view) give the false impression that it can be done cleanly, without the charred flesh and gouged innards.

By being decent, you only extend your own period of suffering. I said, ‘I’m not waiting for you to leave. That’s not what I’m doing.’ But the truth is more like: ‘Tell me whether you ever will, or whether I must accept that the rest of my life will involve this complicated, delicate balancing act. …

‘His father went to jail.’

‘What for?’

‘Theft, I think. Embezzling, maybe.’

‘Embezzling’s creepy, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Worse than straight-out theft. It’s the betrayal of someone’s trust over a long period.’

Horrified that he might think I was referring obliquely to his behaviour towards…

Dinner in Camberwell with my angry sister. She arrived full of bitterness against the tax department, and against me for having lived on a supporting mother’s benefit when M was very small. Went to see Huston’s The Dead at the Rivoli. She fell asleep twenty minutes in. The middle-aged couple on my …