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In 1970 Asimov returned to New York alone. Talk of divorce had increased in frequency in recent years. "After 1969," Asimov reported in his autobiography, "which seemed to consist, in retrospect, of one long slide toward divorce, there had been an upturn, a kind of pleasant Indian summer, a glimmering twilight that had lasted six weeks. . . ." Then he (and his wife, apparently) accepted the fact that the marriage was beyond saving. |
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In his 1994 memoir Asimov attributed the divorce in part to the fact that his wife smoked and he detested smoking. "If I had felt then [when he married Gertrude] as I feel now, or as I felt a few years after I married her, nothing would possibly have persuaded me to marry a woman who smoked. . . . When I discovered that living with Gertrude meant [a house or apartment that was always filled with smoke and with the reek of dead ash tray contents] and that there was no escape, our relationship withered." But he also mentioned Gertrude's rheumatoid arthritis whose pain made her less than reasonable, and his own increasing absorption in his writing that swelled their bank account but, because of Asimov's interest only in "clean paper and a working typewriter," left his wife feeling she got no good out of it. |
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At first, Asimov was going to take an apartment in nearby Wellesley while the divorce went forward. Then he learned that his wife would allow only a separation. Divorce in Massachusetts without his wife's cooperation was virtually impossible for a man with Asimov's stern ethical imperatives, so he moved to New York where he could institute no-fault proceedings. |
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His future second wife, Dr. Janet Jeppson, whom he had met earlier on a few occasions, helped him to find an apartment and adjust to life as a single man after nearly thirty years of marriage. Once more he was back in the city where he had grown from a child of three to a young man of twenty-nine who was a successful but not well-paid science- |
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