How Literary Couples Survive
Four of the hottest writers of the moment are actually two married couples: American Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safron Foer, and Brits Nick Laird and Zadie Smith. How do reclusive, neurotic and intense people keep the romance alive? Well, they don't use the Franzen method. "Jonathan Franzen's gruelling writing regime - to which his ex-wife Valerie Cornell subjected herself for years - has assumed an almost apocryphal quality. Working in a tiny flat only 20ft apart from each other, they wrote for eight hours a day and then read for five hours in the evening, existing on a starvation diet of rice, beans and giant packs of chicken thighs. They ate out only once a year - on their wedding anniversary." They split up and Cornell stopped writing altogether, reports the Guardian.
Most other successful literary couples have hit upon somewhat of a formula. It helps if you write in different genres (novelist and biographer, say) and if you spend your working hours as far apart as possible. One husband works in such isolation that his wife was tied up by burglars and he didn't hear a thing.