Finished reading for the second time Leonard Michaels' 1992 memoir of his first wife, a suicide. Anyone who has ever been trapped in a crazy relationship will recognize the pull of Sylvia: mad, maddening, alluring, painfully alive and destined to be dead, probably on your watch. Fights begin with inadvertent insults, and go on for hours. The only reason she does not kill him while he sleeps, he thinks, is that then she will be in that unbearable position: alone. The best-known lines in the book are: "It would have been easy to leave Sylvia. Had it been difficult, I might have done it."
The 126-page work is not really about Sylvia -- we learn almost nothing about her past, or why she is the way she is -- but only her effect on the narrator, who tells the tale so flatly he might as well have been writing the year of her death, while still in shock, not 30 years later: "Sylvia could be happy and funny, but it easier to remember the bad times. They were more sensational; also less painful now than remembering what I loved."
Affecting, yes, but how true is it? The illustrations in this 1992 Mercury House edition are by Sylvia Bloch, lending a strong note of versimilitude. But the book is subtitled "a fictional memoir," while the back cover says it has evolved from "story-length memoir" to "novelistic." Yet it feels like a pure memoir, mixing self-analysis with snippets of journal, and there seems no legal reason to be circumspect. The events happened a long time ago, and Sylvia after all is dead. The latest edition flat-out calls it "a novel" although Diane Johnson, who provides an introduction, doesn't tackle the matter.
I scanned the net, could see nothing helpful except this comment on Amazon by reader "littlecatland": Don't know how much of this book is really true but if this is actually a portrait of the writer's ex-wife, orphaned, suicided and leaving no children, it's a miserable way to present her, even if he hated her." Maybe, in the end, this is a story of the revenge of the living on the dead.