Self absorbed, but isn't that the point?
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I found this book an almost entertaining read. I did not expect it to be a fair and un-biased account of a divorce. It wasn't. It turned out to be a pretty run-of-the-mill break-up story. Run of the mill in that Ms Flett seemed to fall into the trap that so many women do, caught up in a impossibly perfect romance, going along with the romantic dream of getting married, tries to change the man, man leaves. Yawn. At times I felt empathy with the author, but it was quickly distinguished whenever she let rip with one of her cringe-worthy snobbish comments. "Can we never do that again?" was her comment to Eric after he had taken her to meet his friends who had committed that most heinous crime of deciding to live in the suburbs. Is it any wonder he had second thoughts? She berates Eric for wanting to live in a trendy part of town, then slags his friends off because they are the opposite! What does this woman want? Maybe someone who has exactly her opinions, mind set, and predjudices, moulded into a male version of herself. I can't imagine why she ever wanted to get married. In the end I found it a bit laughable towards the end. Ironically this was the bit where we were supposed to feel sorry for her I think! Worth reading but not exactly heart rending.
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Self-indulgent
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So Kathryn Flett is in a relationship for less than 2 years. It breaks down. Big deal. Not content with keeping a very private matter private, the author documents her version of events in her weekly newspaper column. Still not satisfied with this she turns it into a book so we all get to witness her self indulgence.
Am I being too harsh? Yes, quite probably. But no harsher than the writer in question. The fact is, dispite Ms. Flett's "honest" documentation of the breakdown of her marriage I found very little about the writer herself to sympathise with. Throughout the book she constantly reveals petty, middle-class snobberies and pretensions - case in point, her derision of her husband's friends (a married couple) for living a small-town, middle class suburban life style - as opposed to what? Her own cosmopolitan, Harrod's-shopping, label-worshipping, holiday-hopping, therapy-seeking one?
Throughout the book all we get is constant criticisms of a certain life-style and continuous comparisons to her own far more fashionable and therefore far worthier one as she would like to have us believe. It gets tedious after a while. And this is the reason why I found it so difficult to sympathise, let alone empathise, with the writer.
We find out much later in the book that, surprise surprise, there are links to her current circumstances with her childhood upbringing. And, shock horror, she was a product of inadequate parenting (ie her parents were crap at being parents). Welcome to life.
The fact remains that Ms. Flett comes across as shallow and self-absorbed with few likeable qualities. I ended up feeling quite sorry for her husband - who wants to be publically humiliated? And not once but twice. She indicated that writing about the breakup in her newspaper column was one of the things that kept her going. So what was her excuse for publishing a book out of it?
No, I don't like this sort of one-sided, confessional literature of the often over-privileged that serves no purpose other than to wreak revenge by humiliation of a third party. And of course to give us voyeuristic readers something to either empathise with or to loath.
Dispite being urged by several friends to read this "fantastic" book, I found the whole thing rather distasteful and am glad that I can now hand back the book and stop thinking about Kathryn Flett's hideously selfish public display of self-indulgance.
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Does it matter how much money we have-feelings are feelings
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I read this book a few years ago, before I knew about Amazon and leaving reviews, and it's the only time I've read something that said things that resonated with me about my own marriage breakup - I DID expect things to be different when I married, that I would feel differently, but once the party is over you only have yourself left, it's not about blaming the man or the woman, it takes two to make a marriage/relationship and two to make it breakdown, for whatever reason. This was one person's personal account, someone who has the ability, thank god, to put it into words. I had a nervous breakdown when my marriage fell apart I was 26, I didn't have any money, someone found me some councelling with a charity that could help me, and I am grateful to all those people, friends and professional, who saw me thru that difficult time. I wish the author good luck with the rest of her life.
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A sad story, but why should we care?
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I expected to enjoy this book because I like Kathryn Flett's reviews and articles in the Observer, but I just found it incredibly self-indulgent. The book is described as a memoir of a break-up, but they don't actually split until half way through and I found myself disinterested in the romance and wanting to get to the juicy stuff. But then the juicy stuff was disappointingly dry. Man can't commit and leaves for another woman. Yawn. There is no way this book would have been published if Kathryn Flett wasn't a celebrated journalist and rightly so. Previous reviewers have commented about how she would manage if she had to live on £50 per week. Why? She doesn't, it's irrelevant. Also that she tried to change him and then was surprised when he left - I didn't see that either, he was the one who changed, interesting how we always blame the woman. But still, I couldn't really bring myself to care, particularly when she admitted that perhaps she never really loved him and was just caught up in a fairytale romance. Call me cynical, but no doubt the proceeds from the sales of the book will make the pain easier to bear.
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gripping
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As someone in the same age category recovering from a series of heartbreaks, I found this book frightening in its familiarity. I admired her ascerbic wit in the re-telling of this story. It makes her sound like a survivor, in the end. I can't help but wonder if something is really wrong in our collective expectations when feircely independent women are driven to nervous breakdown on the back of 'the romantic ideal' which often goes wrong or never happens at all - which seems in any case impossible to predict or control.... Although the backdrop to the story is glamorous, it doesn't detract from the emotional devastation.
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