>"Picture Lee in 1963, coming home to a simple wooden cabin at the base of the Smoky Mountains. Beside her is a struggling writer named Cormac McCarthy. The newlyweds cross the threshold with their infant son and try to become a family. You can hear katydids, crickets, and tree frogs. You can hear a nearby creek flowing into Little Pigeon River."

>"The coupling doesn’t last long. Lee will eventually leave and head West, telling her version of the split in a poem I heard her read again and again. Transported back to “the front porch of a farmhouse near Pigeon Forge,” she says: “You don’t act as if you want a wife and baby. You act as if you want to be single again.”"

>“I guess that’s right,” the man says. I picture Lee packing a suitcase that she drags to the porch where Cormac waits.

>“But what will you do?” the man in the poem says to Lee, “Be a whore?”

>"I’m sure it takes just a moment. Then Lee is back in the house. Her jaw tight. Her stomach on fire. She wouldn’t be crying. She would be kicking a pair of boots out of her way. I see Lee sliding the mattress, dragging it onto the front lawn. She can’t find gasoline, but she’s looking. “I tried to burn the mattress” she writes. She tries to incinerate the centerpiece of their domestic life. Rest, time, the sheets softening each week, Lee wants to light it on fire.

>"Many of us are well acquainted with the mythology of Cormac’s penniless writerly origin story. In Richard Woodward’s 1992 profile of him in the New York Times, he asks Cormac if he ever paid alimony, “‘With what?’ Cormac snorts” [...] We also now know that Cormac was poor on purpose and that he will eventually fall in love with a 16-year-old girl the same age as his and Lee’s son, convincing the girl that Lee’s clan “detested” him and “forbade them from being together.” Yet when I’m combing through the depositions Lee gave during the censorship battles she fought as a schoolteacher in the 1970s and 1980s, she testifies that she tried for many years to reconcile with Cormac, her only son’s father."

https://lithub.com/leaving-cormac-life-lessons-from-my-correspondence-with-lee-mccarthy/

Why was he like this?

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>"Picture Lee in 1963, coming home to a simple wooden cabin at the base of the Smoky Mountains. Beside her is a struggling writer named Cormac…