Title:: [[Divorcing]] Authors:: [[Susan Taubes]] Tags:: #fiction Read:: [[2024-04-14]] Instagram :: https://www.instagram.com/jeronimo_ficus/p/C5w2141MKOF/ ## Editions - Edition:: [[New York Review of Books (NYRB)]], 2020 - Original Copyright:: 1969 - Pages:: 265 ## Purchase * Bookshop.org:: https://bookshop.org/a/94437/9781681374949 ## Annotations Haunting and surreal, I think this one’s going to stick with me for a while.  If you come into this blind (ahem), like I did, you’ll learn from David Rieff’s introduction that Taubes died by suicide two weeks after Divorcing’s publication. She drowned off of an East Hampton, NY beach in November 1969 (“There’s nobody here,” her unwitting taxi driver supposedly told her; her response: “I realize that.”).  This is a novel about death, the weight of the world, relationships, and the feelings of entrapment that compound when the truths of choice and coincidence start to pile up. That Rieff would share Taubes’ ending in his beginning doesn’t exactly give away the game.  It’s hard not to think of the late musician David Berman. He too died by suicide shortly after the release of his last album (Purple Mountains), and like Taubes there is intentionality that is both eerie and beautiful about the foreshadowing each of their last works impart.