Overspent on Sugar
In her memoir of a truly dysfunctional family, The Liar’s Club, Mary Karr tells of a Texas uncle who remained married to his wife but did not speak to her for forty years after a fight over how much money she spent on sugar. One day he took out a lumber saw and sawed their house exactly in half. He nailed up planks to cover the raw sides and moved one of the halves behind a copse of scruffy pines trees on the same acre of ground. There the two, husband and wife, lived out the rest of their days in separate half-houses.