After marrying fellow student Lee Holleman in 1961, McCarthy "moved to a shack with no heat and running water in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains outside of Knoxville". There, the couple had a son, Cullen, in 1962. When writer James Agee's childhood home was being demolished in Knoxville that year, McCarthy used the site's bricks to build fireplaces inside his Sevier County shack.
While Lee cared for the baby and tended to the chores of the house, Cormac asked her to get a day job so he could focus on his novel writing. Dismayed with the situation, she moved to Wyoming, where she filed for divorce and landed her first job teaching.
In The Book of Lists, a trivia book I grew up on in the years before the term "listicle" had been coined, there was a list of shitty things famous writers made their wives do. The one that stuck with me most viscerally was "Leo Tolstoy had his wife copy out War and Peace five times in longhand."
(Memory may be faulty, so this could have been in another trivia book from my childhood.)
A friend of mine in high school joked for years that he was going to go to college, meet and marry a pre-med student, put her through med school, then once she started working, quit his job and become a poet.
I shared this just a few weeks ago but it's too good not to share it again.
In The Book of Lists, a trivia book I grew up on in the years before the term "listicle" had been coined, there was a list of shitty things famous writers made their wives do. The one that stuck with me most viscerally was "Leo Tolstoy had his wife copy out War and Peace five times in longhand."
(Memory may be faulty, so this could have been in another trivia book from my childhood.)
A friend of mine in high school joked for years that he was going to go to college, meet and marry a pre-med student, put her through med school, then once she started working, quit his job and become a poet.