It can be hard when shrinks go on summer vacation — especially in a summer when each news cycle seems to bring more upsetting developments to process. And it doesn’t help that the fourth season of the cult favorite Showtime docuseries “Couples Therapy” has just wrapped, so even affordable, vicarious therapy is off the table. Without our weekly fix of Dr. Orna Guralnik’s deep nods and cathartic sympathy crying — and with the good doctor’s own much-anticipated book still months off — what are we to do?
The series, which started airing in 2019, did not seem to have the makings of a hit: real couples, sitting on a Brooklyn sofa, telling a therapist their problems. At worst, thought skeptics, it sounded voyeuristic and upsetting; at best, boring and contrived. Long before Annie and Mau were a twinkle in my eye, or I’d wept over Season 2, or I’d had wildly differing feelings about different strangers named Josh, I, too, was one of those people. “Watch it,” said a co-worker. “Nothing you thought will ever be the same.” Forty-five minutes in, I was hooked.
There are many reasons “Couples Therapy” has broken through: the happy surprise of seeing our perceptions change, the age-old distraction of other peoples’ problems, the actual applicable advice, Dr. Guralnik’s glossy mane and teeny tiny braids (a major discussion point on message boards).
But even if you aren’t a fan of the show, these shoulder-season reads will get you through August with wisdom, schadenfreude, dysfunction, pain and humor — and sometimes all of the above. It’s not a spoiler that most of these couples could use a session or 10.
Desperate Characters, by Paula Fox (1970)
Otto and Sophie Bentwood are a childless couple in their early 40s living in a rapidly gentrifying Brooklyn (they’re the gentrifiers). Life seems comfortable — until Sophie is bitten by a feral cat and their carefully ordered existence begins to crumble. There’s even a kitchen renovation in this sharply observed, humane classic of New York marriage. (Read about the book’s legacy.)
Splinters: Another Kind of Love Story, by Leslie Jamison (2024)
Fast-forward 50 years to another Brooklyn and another couple — this time the author and her writer husband, whose acrimonious split Jamison chronicles with characteristic intimacy. It’s been called “memoir as therapy.” (Read our review.)
Memorial, by Bryan Washington (2020)
Mike and Benson, a young gay couple in Houston, are … fine. A chef and a teacher, they have built a functional and loving, if unexciting, life together. Everything is challenged when Mike has to go to Japan to see his dying father, while Mike’s mother comes and lives with Benson. Let’s just say the unexamined life gets very, very examined — to moving and comic effect. (Read our review.)
On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan (2007)
We meet Edward and Florence on their 1962 wedding night at a small hotel in Dorset, England, where the realities of their pasts, expectations and feelings about intimacy collide painfully. Decades later, both characters reflect on the experience. A quiet, gutting gem of a novella. (Read our review.)
Ghachar Ghochar, by Vivek Shanbhag (2017)
The protagonist’s hardscrabble life in Bangalore changes abruptly when his uncle starts a successful spice company. Allegiances are tested; close-knit generational bonds begin to fray. Whom to marry — and why — is suddenly an open question, and love vies with pragmatism in this often wrenching, frequently funny, sort of cautionary tale. (Read our review.)
The Argonauts, by Maggie Nelson (2015)
Nelson’s fierce, genre-bending memoir-cum-critical-treatise freed up a generation to meditate on queer identity, power struggles and the nature of love in a time of theory, and it has quickly become a modern classic. Nothing — gender, parenthood, fidelity, the perils of overthinking and certainly not the author’s own relationships — escapes the writer’s gaze. (Read our review.)
Maud Martha, by Gwendolyn Brooks (1953)
Brooks’s autobiographical novel of growing up in 1920s Chicago is a master-class in detailing family dynamics. In some ways, this is a coming-of-age story, but it’s also a subtle depiction of a couple’s shifting intimacies. (Read our review.)
Madame Bovary, by Gustave Flaubert (1857)
Flaubert’s masterpiece is not just the definitive novel of 19th century French realism, or of provincial mores, or of frustrated desires, or of unhappy marriage — although it’s certainly all of that. Its appeal lies in the eternal human pastime of judging others while recognizing that, in the words of the author, “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.” (Read our review of a 2010 translation.)
Seven Days in June, by Tia Williams (2021)
As teens, Shane and Eva had one passionate week of first love, which ended badly. Now adults — he’s a “serious” novelist, she’s a popular writer of erotica — they reconnect in Brooklyn’s Black literary scene. They’re prey to the speculation and gossip of their shared milieu, but also dealing with the pressures of rebuilding trust and translating youthful excitement into a lasting relationship. (Read our review of Williams’s latest book.)
Fair Play, by Tove Jansson (1989)
Mari and Jonna are long-term companions, two artists living in both interconnected Helsinki apartments and on a tiny, remote island. Not much “happens” in this autobiographical series of vignettes — they hang paintings, patch a fishing net, take a road trip, gently argue, get crushes — but it’s a thrilling depiction of a real creative life in which true intimacy does not require drama. (Read more about the book.)
Portrait of a Marriage: Vita Sackville-West and Harold Nicolson, by Nigel Nicolson (1998)
I know someone who gives this book — a combination of Sackville-West’s own writings with her son Nigel’s dissection of his parents’ marriage — as a wedding gift to everyone he knows, convention (and registry) be damned. The couple in question had a famously idiosyncratic, and successful, marriage: While she pursued relationships with women (several famous), they remained companions and best friends to the end. (Read our review.)
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