In the throes of my long and mostly happy marriage I had begun reading books about divorce. I couldn’t get enough of them. It began with reading Deborah Levy in Paris during the early days of the pandemic—The Cost of Living—which set me on a quest to read everything Levy had written, at the exact time I could get nothing that she had written, because the Paris bookshops were all closed and, unlike American bookshops, they weren’t even shipping during the pandemic. But eventually Librarie Galignani on Rue de Rivoli reopened as an “essential business” and I got every Levy book they had and read them all.1
Just this month, by way of a tweet from
I came across . She seemed intriguing so I googled “Joanna Walsh writer interview,” which led me toan interview with Walshin which she sits on a stool in the middle of a barren room, wearing a white dress, talking about where stories come from. After watching the interview I decided I had to read every book she had ever published, so I ordered four of her books and gave the title of another one to my son, who had asked just days before, “What book can I get you for your birthday?” I picked My Life as a Godard Movie because my son is the biggest 17-year-old fan of Godard you will ever meet, at least the biggest 17-year-old fan of Godard you are likely to meet in the Northern California suburbs. The first of Walsh’s books to arrive wasVertigo, in which an unhappy marriage is in the works. It is slim and lovely and took only an hour to read, even though I read rather slowly.Then I delved into Walsh’s Break-Up: A Novel in Essays, a bigger and tougher book. “Let me make things difficult,” Walsh writes. “Let me make difficult things.” This book is a strange bird. In the first chapter Walsh talks about a kind of all-consuming love that took place, primarily online, over the course of many years. After the breakup she travels around Europe with a few books—five to be precise—which appeals to me because when we were living in Paris, both before and after the first lockdown, I used to carry these five books around with me, and through these books I found a way into writing. At any rate, I haven’t gotten very far into Break-Up yet, as it just arrived two days ago, but I’m finding it brilliant and sad, the kind of book I think about when I’m doing other things.
While skimming the New York Times the Saturday after the midterms, I came across a Modern Love piece by a man named Joe Blair whose wife kicked him out six times because she claimed he didn’t love her enough. Though he ends the essay by saying he will always love her, he says a few times in the essay how much he liked being alone in the crappy, often infested apartments he rented after being kicked out. The last time she kicked him out, he even pondered, “I would wonder how one is supposed to find love. Where to look? How to begin?”
“At your house!” I want to scream to him. “With your wife and the children she is raising for you while you are wandering around, reading Kafka, and pondering love in your ant-infested apartment!”
But I’m just practical that way. When I married my longtime boyfriend (I was 29 when we married, we’d been together since I was 24) I confessed that one of the things I was most excited about was sex-on-tap. “I never have to go out looking for it,” I said. “I come home, and there it is.”
“Wait,” my husband said. “Does that mean you’ll be tipping?”
What I mean is, the ideal of marriage—which is far from the reality for many marriages—is that all of the best things can be found at home: the one you love, the one who loves you, the one you support, the one who supports you, the one with whom laughter and despair are equally natural and accepted, the one who knows what you looked like when you looked much hotter than you do now and who still thinks of you as that hot person, decades later, because memory can be a blessed thing and anyway, the change has been so gradual this spouse-person hardly noticed it. So when Blair, married for 32 years, says of love, “How to look? Where to begin?” I suspect he is intentionally avoiding the obvious and that his wife was right all along—this was a man who was not quite capable of loving her enough.
At any rate, in the bio I saw that Joe Blair had written a memoir called By the Iowa Sea, an evocative if georgraphically confusing title. I read the first few pages and realized that the memoir is beautifully written and is also probably about his on-and-off marriage. Of course I bought it. How could I not? Give me a book about an unhappy marriage and I am so down for it.
Maybe the fortunately betrothed read books about breakups and unhappy marriages for the same reason many of us watch horror movies. We read, as we watch, with our hands over our face, peeking through our fingers at the calamity, preferring to watch a terrible thing rather than to experience it. Maybe we think the observance keeps the thing at bay. Just as we don’t go into a dark basement alone after the landline has been cut in a blizzard (we’ve seen it in the movies! We know what happens!), there are lessons to be learned from these books of unhappy marriages.
Anyway, I suppose it is not a surprise that most of my books have been about marriage in some way. When I finally went all out and wrote a book with marriage in the title, it was a book about a couple against the world, not a a book about two people against each other. It is not a book about a perfect marriage, because there is no such thing. It is not a book about an always-happy marriage, because that is probably a rare thing. But it is a book about love and where, if you’re lucky, you find it: at home.
Of course, there are essays I’ve written and never published. Of course, in any of my books, a person can read between the lines. I am not an inhabitant of a perfect marriage or of a marriage that has never suffered unhappiness. I am just the inhabitant of a long marriage that, over time, has become the best home I can imagine and a better home than I could have predicted. I have been on the receiving end of the love and commitment of a good and funny and reasonable man. While any long-married couple has surely put in the work to stay married, I’m well aware that luck comes into play in finding the one to marry. What is required, however, in those early stages of love, after the lucky finding is done, is a don’t-look-back kind of decision-making, a go-for-broke determination. One must declare to oneself and to the world: this is the one and I will not be looking elsewhere, no matter who else comes along. One must never swipe right again. Or is it left? I have no idea. I am old enough that our early love never never had to contend with those variables.
There is a song I used to listen to over and over again called “Oh, the Divorces!” by Tracy Thorn, from the album Love and Its Opposite. It’s an unsettling and addicting song.
Many years ago, our dear friend Wade from Texas came to town for a visit. During his stay, he helped our son, who was very young at the time, make a movie on his Flip Video camera (remember those?). The movie involved toy soldiers battling it out on our dining room table. The background track was “Oh, the Divorces.” Now, as I write this, I play it again, remembering how much I loved it then. The song can be heard as a warning. “Who’s next? Who’s next?” the refrain goes. “It’s always the ones that you least expect.”
And each time I hear who's to part
I examine my heart
See how it stands
Wonder if it's still in safe hands
In the version of the song recorded at Thorn’s home, the musician sits at a piano amidst the clutter of family life, singing the song, while a man lurks behind the piano fixing things. I can’t tell if it’s her husband, but it looks like the kind of thing a husband might do. I looked her up on Wikipedia. Under “Personal Life,” I found this:
After 28 years as a couple, Thorn and the other half of Everything But The Girl, Ben Watt, married in 2009 at Chelsea Register Office. They live in Hampstead, North London. The couple have twin girls, Jean and Alfie, born in 1998.
Maybe for Thorn the secret to a happy marriage was not getting married for a very long time. But also, there’s that line about safe hands. Indeed, it takes two pair of safe hands to make a marriage last. One pair of hands can’t hold a marriage.
For now I’ll keep reading those books of breakups and unhappy marriages, wherein I might glimpse the dark basements we almost walked into without a flashlight but didn’t. I’ll keep listening to Thorn and her passionate warnings, though the warnings seem less necessary now than they once did. The thing about a long marriage is that the forces that once threatened it eventually fall by the wayside2, and what is left is the marriage. The marriage itself is the force.
Michelle Richmond is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books of fiction, including The Marriage Pact. You are receiving this newsletter because you signed up at michellerichmond.com or at themarriagepact.org. You might have signed up a long time ago, because I haven’t sent out a newsletter in a while. I’m trying to do better! I promise.
By the time we left Paris in November, bookstores would be deemed non-essential again, and large retailers that sold “non-essential items” like books alongside groceries would be required to drape giant tarps over the books so no one would be tempted to look. This went over as well as you might expect in France, where people are crazy about books.
Before posting publish I said to my husband, “Can you read this?” as I almost always do before I hit publish. He read it and said, “What was that line I heard the other day? I can’t remember where the quote is from, but it’s something like, ‘My mother told me that the first twenty years of marriage is always the hardest.” For reference, he and I have been married for 21 years and eleven months.