Quite possibly coming from my perspective as a perpetual single person, this book made me angry. It's clearly a marriage that has gone on too long, one that should have ended years before. Irene and Gil have three children, who alternate between wanting their parents to divorce and wanting them to stay together. Both parties are faulted with the bad marriage, both manipulate, both use and take. I couldn't find sympathy for one over the other until near the end.
Gil made his art career out of painting portraits of his wife. She never paid much attention to what he painted, she just sat for him and became increasingly bitter towards their marriage. When she finally sees what Gil has done to her image, possibly what he thinks about her, she's angry. So she drinks. When Gil starts reading her diary, she makes a new diary and keeps it in a safety deposit box. And she drinks. She decides to keep writing in the diary that Gil is reading in order to manipulate his emotions, knowing full well his anger is violent. She drinks. She's angry when he starts hitting the children but she keeps going, keeps writing stories of affairs in the diary to make him angrier.
Gil refuses to grant a divorce, refuses to leave. He even envisions that they will spend their afterlife together. Gil is an artist with such delusions that I couldn't stand one iota of his character. He clearly uses and takes advantage of Irene to keep his career going, claiming his love and devotion, but hating her all the same.
They have a terrible, toxic, love/hate/hate relationship and it was, at times, painful to read. Of all the characters, I felt for the children. I wished for their sake something would happen with their parents to help them get away from that abusive house.
Ironic. Considering the ending. I was surprised at what I read, enough that I had to go back and re-read other passages to realize what I had missed.
What started off as a good study in a terrible marriage, ended in shock and surprise.
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