Dear readers,
Marriage is like a second-grade spelling test: We shield our work while glancing around to see if a neighbor’s answers match. And I do mean work! Sharing your life with someone can be challenging, but it’s also fun and oddly liberating because you never really know how your weird union compares with anyone else’s. Eventually you learn to keep your eyes on your own paper.
Unless you’re a reader. Then you’re privy to the occasional marriage memoir, in which some brave, generous, often beleaguered soul lifts the curtain on the whole operation and tells the rest of us what’s going on behind the scenes. This year has been a bonanza for voyeurs, thanks to Leslie Jamison (“Splinters”), Lyz Lenz (“This American Ex-Wife”) and Molly Roden Winter (“More”). Honorable mentions go to Maggie Smith for “You Could Make This Place Beautiful,” which came out last year, and “Liars” by Sarah Manguso, a novel so real-feeling it could be a body double for a true story.
With one polyamorous exception, all of the above skew to the divorce end of the spectrum. This is not to say that their authors haven’t lived happily ever after; they’re doing just fine, if acknowledgments pages and Instagram posts are to be believed.
But in honor of the 25th anniversary of the day I accidentally smeared car grease across my dress and had my name spelled wrong in the program — also known as my wedding day, Sept. 25, 1999 — I decided to reread two memoirs of happy marriages. These books were every bit as candid and thought-provoking and, in some ways, aspirational as I remembered.
—Liz
PS. Both of these memoirs are really sad. Don’t read too much into it.
“The Light of the World,” by Elizabeth Alexander
Nonfiction, 2015
“In all marriages there is struggle and ours was no different in that regard,” Alexander writes. “But we always came to the other shore, dusted off, and said, There you are, my love.”
Now that’s a quote to tape to the mirror where you brush your teeth next to the same person night after night.
“The Light of the World” is Alexander’s memoir of her 15-year marriage to Ficre Ghebreyesus, an artist from Eritrea who died of a heart attack in 2012. You might remember Alexander as the poet from President Obama’s first Inauguration; she’s also an essayist, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for this book) and a former Yale professor who now runs the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Some might file “The Light of the World” under “grief/loss.” I’d place it face out — the better to see Ghebreysus’s cover art — on the shelf marked “gorgeous snapshot of love at first sight.”
Alexander and Ghebreyesus met at a New Haven cafe purely by chance. She was drinking an orange pineapple smoothie, waiting for a friend who never showed, when a stranger said, “Excuse me.” By the time they were done talking — well, really, they never stopped — he wasn’t a stranger anymore. They had two sons. They bought a house with a big garden and cooked delicious meals for friends, cousins, parents, students and whoever else happened to be passing through. (The book includes recipes.)
“Ours was a house where the piano was played, a house where we sometimes read poetry at the dinner table,” Alexander writes. “A house where traditional Eritrean guayla was danced in a circle, and where friends danced to funk ’til the windows steamed up.”
Was there strife? Frustration? Were Alexander and her husband occasionally exhausted and snippy with one another? Probably. But, in sharing flashbacks as seen through a scrim of grief and shock — there was no long illness, no chance to prepare — Alexander shows a perennial bloom of respect and kindness. She also shows what’s possible in a relationship built on kindness and respect.
Read if you like: Paintings on large canvases, pink and white peonies, red lentil and tomato curry, “The Year of Magical Thinking.”
Available from: R.J. Julia and Better World Books both have copies, or check your library or favorite bookseller.
“Elegy for Iris,” by John Bayley
Nonfiction, 1998
Bayley’s memoir is divided into two sections: “Then” and “Now.” The first tells the story of his life with the novelist Iris Murdoch — their books, their travels, their river swims, their devotion to a life of the mind. The second is a diary of a year of Bayley’s patient, painstaking care of Murdoch, who had Alzheimer’s disease. She died in 1999.
When the book came out, conversation and coverage seemed to coalesce around a single detail: Bayley and Murdoch watching “Teletubbies” on a newly acquired television. As Murdoch’s memory worsened, the BBC children’s show entered their morning routine — one Bayley clung to and Murdoch seemed to enjoy, with occasional obstinacy. He describes the Tubbies’ “virtual-reality landscape,” their “underground house, neatly roofed with grass.” How, when a real baby’s face appeared in the sky, Murdoch beamed back.
At 25, I found this tableau horrifying; how could two intellectual giants resign themselves to such cheerful dreck? At 50, I see beauty, simplicity and peace in the predictability.
“Humor seems to survive anything,” Bayley writes. And then: “Our mode of communication seems like underwater sonar, each bouncing pulsations off the other, then listening for an echo.”
Much of “Elegy for Iris” has to do with this dwindling of communication: “No more letters, no more words.” Their long conversation might be over, but Bayley’s and Murdoch’s many books live on, as true today as they ever were.
Read if you like: Tea, bicycles, hot water bottles, Henry James.
Available from: A decent library, a dusty used bookstore.
Why don’t you …
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Immerse yourself in Ficre Ghebreyesus’s art? The entry point for his website is a colorful boat that appeared on the hardcover of “The Light of the World.”
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Explore Iris Murdoch’s world? This starter kit will help you get your bearings.
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Dip into a few essays about marital bliss? If you can’t commit (ahem) to an entire book, “This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage” and “Kiss Me in the Coral Lounge” are great places to start.
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