Last Updated on 07/09/2024 by Arun jain
dear readers,
Marriage is like a second-grade spelling test: We shield our work while looking around to see if a neighbor’s answers match. And I mean work! Sharing your life with someone can be challenging, but it’s also fun and strangely liberating because you never really know how your strange union compares to someone else’s. Eventually you learn to keep your eye on your own paper.
Unless you’re a reader. Then you’re familiar with the occasional wedding memoir, in which some brave, generous, often troubled soul lifts the curtain on the entire operation and tells the rest of us what’s going on behind the scenes. Thanks to Leslie Jamison (“Splinters“), Liz Lenz (“This American ex-wife”) and Molly Rhoden Winter (“More“). For Honorable Mentions go to Maggie Smith “You can make this place beautiful,” which came out last year, and “lie” by Sarah Manguso, a novel that feels so real that it could be a body double for a true story.
With one versatile exception, all of the above lean toward the divorce end of the spectrum. This is not to say that their authors never lived happily ever after; If acceptance pages and Instagram posts are to be believed they are doing just fine.
But in honor of the 25th anniversary of the day I accidentally got car grease on my dress and misspelled my name in the program — also known as my wedding day, September 25, 1999 — I decided to reread two memoirs of a happy marriage. These books were every bit as frank and thought-provoking and, in some ways, ambitious as I remember.
–Liz
P.S. Both these memoirs are really sad. Don’t read too much into it.
“Light of the World,” By Elizabeth Alexander
Nonfiction, 2015
“All marriages have conflict, and ours was no different,” writes Alexander. “But we always came to the other shore, biting the dust, and said, My love, there you are.”
Now it is A quote for taping on 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 Fikr Ghebreyesus, an Eritrean artist who died of a heart attack in 2012. You may remember Alexander as the poet at President Obama’s first inauguration; He is also an essayist, a Pulitzer Prize finalist (for this book), and a former Yale professor who is now the Andrew W. Mellon runs the Foundation. Some may file “The Light of the World” under “Sadness/Loss”. Better to see Ghebreyesus’ cover art — I’ll face it — on a shelf marked “a gorgeous snapshot of love at first sight.”
Alexander and Ghebreyesus met by chance in a New Haven cafe. She was drinking an orange pineapple smoothie, waiting for a friend who never showed up, when a stranger said, “Excuse me.” By the time they were talking—well, really, they never stopped—he was no longer a stranger. He had two sons. They bought a house with a large garden and cooked delicious meals for friends, cousins, parents, students and others who passed by. (Book includes recipes.)
“We had a house where the piano was played, a house where we sometimes read poetry at the dinner table,” writes Alexander. “A house where the traditional Eritrean Guela A circle was danced, and where friends danced to the funk until the windows steamed up.”
Was there a fight? Frustration? Did Alexander and her husband sometimes get tired and mean to each other? maybe. But, in sharing a flashback seen through the noise of grief and trauma — there was no lingering illness, no chance to prepare — Alexander displays a perennial bloom of respect and kindness. It also shows what is possible in a relationship built on kindness and respect.
Read if you like: Paintings on large canvases, pink and white peonies, red dal and tomato curry, “A year of magical thinking“
Available from: Both RJ Julia and Better World Books have copies, or check your library or favorite bookseller.
“Elegy for Iris,” By John Bailey
Nonfiction, 1998
Bailey’s memoir is divided into two sections: “Then” and “Now.” The debut novelist tells the story of his life with Iris Murdoch – his books, his travels, his river swimming, his devotion to the life of the mind. The second is a year-long diary of Bailey’s patient, Murdoch, who suffered from Alzheimer’s disease. She died in 1999.
When the book came out, the conversation and coverage seemed to coalesce around a single detail: Bailey and Murdoch watching “Teletubbies” on a newly acquired television. As Murdoch’s memory worsened, the BBC children’s show crept into his morning routine – with a belly clinging and Murdoch reveling in the occasional hiccup. It describes the Tubbies’ “virtual-reality landscape”, their “underground house, neatly roofed with grass”. How, when the face of a real baby appeared in the sky, Murdoch turned back.
At 25, I found this overview terrifying; How could two intellectual giants resign themselves to such a cheerful drake? At 50, I see beauty, simplicity and peace in predictability.
“Humour seems to survive anything,” writes Belle. And then: “Our mode of communication resembles underwater sonar, each bouncing pulse bouncing off one another, then hearing an echo.”
Much of “Elegy for Iris” has to do with this declining communication: “No more letters, no more words.” Their long conversation may have ended, but many of Bayley and Murdoch’s books live on, as true today as they ever were.
Read if you like: Tea, bicycle, hot water bottle, Henry James.
Available from: A proper library, a dusty bookstore.
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