Writers who leave their wives lost for words - Telegraph

Writers who leave their wives lost for words - Telegraph: All in all, writers, and particularly novelists, are difficult people, with periods of their greatest difficulty tied predictably to their best achievement. Those closest to them will need saintly powers of support, patience and an inability to hold a grudge. It is a mystery to me how marriages consisting of two novelists can possibly function – I suppose they settle into a rhythm of alternating creative periods. Perhaps even more puzzling is how a mind which genuinely rests on the sympathetic observation of human behaviour can have quite long periods when it, just as genuinely, could not really care less if those about them were eaten by wolves. The next time you read a passionately sympathetic study of the emotional life, you might like to reflect that it may have been written by someone utterly ignoring his wife’s daily conversation.