Anne Theroux's thoughtful, engaging memoir, The Year of the End, explores her separation from novelist Paul Theroux three decades after the fact. Using brief entries from the diary she kept during 1990 (the couple separated that January), Theroux revisits what was really happening behind and around the few sentences she wrote each day. Month by month, she explores her maelstrom of emotions ("My journey of loss was full of stops and starts," she writes); her coping mechanisms, including a trip to Egypt and sometimes drinking too much; and her gradual realization that her marriage was over for good.
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. She muses on several world events (Nelson Mandela's release from prison, Margaret Thatcher's fall from power), but mostly focuses on quotidian details: working in the garden, trying to find a new job. Throughout the book, she considers the difficulties of being married to a brilliant but often harsh novelist, and her struggle to carve out a new identity for herself after Paul left. In recounting her year of limbo and reflecting on their years together, she has created both a tribute to their marriage and a poignant exploration of how it felt to watch it disintegrate. Often melancholy and quietly candid, The Year of the End is a sensitive account of a woman stepping into a complicated new freedom. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams