Peter Carey and my mother

I read the long
Spectrum article about Peter Carey and his new book this week-end. Apparently it has a central character going through a divorce with distinct similarities to the recent real life divorce of a certain Australian expatriate author living in New York. The female SMH journo spoke to the former wife of Mr Carey who made certain very measured comments about the break up. On the other hand, according to Crikey, a male journo in The Age , stated he deliberately decided to avoid the topic of Peter's divorce because it wasn't really that relevant. Um, sure.

Writers are just so cannibalistic. Why do they think they can get away with humiliating their exes by pretending it's all fiction? (I'm talking about you, Salman Rushdie.) I mean, you're a Booker winning author; your exes are usually not that well known. There's a bit of a power imbalance.

Writers should come with written warning "if you go out with me our most intimate moments will be rewritten to make me look better and presented to the world as fiction which everyone will assume to be fact."

I can take or leave Peter Carey. He knows how to write a page turner but I'm not sure there's much below the surface that I want to know about. Many years ago, my mother declared (as is her wont) that in a previous life she must have been married to Peter Carey. She was a real fan of his prose style based on reading the ever so charming Illywhacker. When the much much darker Tax Inspector appeared, I annoyed her a lot by borrowing it from the uni library and then reading it first. I wish I hadn't because then I felt responsible for giving her a book where a heavily pregnant woman is brutalised amongst other grotesqueries. She found it "sickmaking" and I thought their past life relationship would be all off but she keeps going back to the well. I guess I should be relieved I didn't give her a copy of anything by the Marquis de Sade.