Tonight:
9°c
My ex-wife, Liz Jones, has a new book out this week, The Exmoor Files: How I Lost a Husband and Found Rural Bliss.
In it she gives her version of our marital break-up two years ago, which she documented in her newspaper columns, and her experience of moving to the country afterwards.
It was excruciating to have my dirty linen aired like that but I'd been an appallingly unfaithful husband and to some extent felt it was her prerogative to badmouth me in public. Like the mistakes I made in my marriage, it was an experience I never want to repeat.
I now look back on Liz's work and am awed by the phenomenon she created. She turned the genre of confessional journalism almost into an art form — and made a name for herself in the process.
Detailing the intimacies of her private and emotional life with brutal frankness, her columns had a pace, turn of phrase and expectancy that any novelist would be proud of. Uncomfortable as it was to be her subject, I could never fault the quality of her writing.
Others disagree. Last Sunday, one magazine published a disdainful interview describing her as looking “a bit mad”, implying that her writing stemmed from a mental disorder.
When we were married, I sometimes called Liz mad too. I now acknowledge that she is, in fact, a genius, a brilliantly effective writer who can provoke 130,000 comments to a newspaper with a single article about her anorexic relationship with food.
Some dismiss her work because much of it focuses on herself, but the same is true of many journalists, diarists, even novelists. And how many other writers have tapped the public nerve so powerfully and consistently?
Though her columns concentrated on our marriage, they recorded a unique moment in the history of women as they finally flood through the cracks in glass ceilings in unprecedented numbers. Liz articulated the anxieties of a successful woman who out-earned her husband and sacrificed motherhood for her career — yet still felt pressured to conform to idealised notions of beauty and achieve the mythical state of “having it all”.
Her success reflects the increasing feminisation of our culture, in which women's interests in relationships and domestic life compete equally for attention with male concerns.
On topics such as multiculturalism, female empowerment and the neuroses of consumer society, other columnists pontificate loftily without insight. Liz, however, took readers on a unique journey through the reality of these issues via the nitty-gritty of her mixed-race marriage to a less-accomplished younger man — me. Her columns were compulsive reading.
Other writers have boosted their careers by penning what poses as the highly confessional while omitting detail to spare themselves ridicule, such as the fact that a husband's affair was actually with another man, or publicising the trauma of giving birth to a sickly child without admitting that booze and fags were enjoyed throughout the pregnancy.
It is Liz's merciless honesty that put her in a league of her own — and I readily acknowledge it, even when the honesty hurt me. Like that other great columnist, Julie Burchill, she provokes adoration and hatred for daring to unveil the darker side of the female psyche. Julie confessed she felt nothing for her first child, while Liz admitted that she feels superior to others simply for being thinner.
Like her readers, Liz's critics are overwhelmingly women. But however strange they think she is, they can't deny that she has pioneered new limits for journalism and has the sort of hold on the public imagination — particularly of women — that most writers can only dream of.
Reader views (6)
Having heard Liz Jones on a programme on BBC Radio 4 I now have much more sympathy for Nirpal Dhaliwal; Ms Jones is an absolute horror. She is quite happy to put friendships and marriage on display, simply discarding relationships if people dare to remonstrate with her. Of the marriage it has to be said neither party behaved well but surely it is time for both sides to stop airing their dirty linen in public and move on.
- Stumpweasel, Hertfordshire, England
Don't worry mate, I've never heard of either of you and would be surprised if I wasn't in a majority of 99.99999%.
- Eric, London, UK
Vile woman. How can anyone take her seriously after her utterly pathetic 'report' on Glastonbury Festival? http://tinyurl.com/pvma2q 130,000 comments? That article has NONE - the publisher switched them off because of all the corrections/negative feedback...
- Warren, London
Hermi is quite correct; to add to the list Liz Jones describes herself as being 50---she has been 50 for many years now.
- Dectora, London UK
A phenomenon yes, entirely honest no.
We'll gloss over the hypocrisy and the neuroticism (her writing is incredibly compelling for these reasons), but she really isn't truthful:
A few concrete examples: she talks about her sea views, whereas she lives 20km from the sea.
She talks about being all alone in her farmhouse, when in fact her sister lives with her.
She damns all women who chase married men, but is at the moment stalking her married crush in her column.
She writes about her marriage but was horrified to discover that on divorce websites people splurged their secrets everywhere.
She describes her neighbours as being ancient and inbred and her nearest town being entirely lacking in amenities, when in fact it's Dulverton and it's pretty middle class, with a number of delis and good restaurants.
She says she was set up on a date with a millionaire by 'a friend', when in fact it was organised by the high end dating company Berkeley Sweetingham as part of a feature for the DM.
These are just a few examples I can remember (yes, I'm sad and possessed of an excellent memory), but it makes you wonder about the truth behind her much-vaunted emotional honesty.
And - you've been terribly nice to her here Nirpal – but isn't it fair to say that she rather treated you like a second class citizen in your marriage, frequently reminding you who held the purse strings? Not that it justifies your behaviour, but she's not really to be held up as the paradigm of a generation.
- Hermi, London
I like Liz's writings and her commonsense articles on debunking fashion and other myths are fantastic. She wrote about her marriage endlessly - almost to the point of obsession. It's time for her to let go and move on. I'm tired of the same old personal linen being washed in public over and over. So - you had affairs and she was the wronged wife - big deal! It hurts, yes, and you were at fault but Liz - move on and stop airing personal stuff in public - it's boring. Unless of course it's an easy way of making your mandatory 1,000 words of copy per week ....
- Alison, London
