"Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage" by Heather Havrilesky

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An examination of the institution of marriage probably doesn't sound all that funny to you. Well, you haven’t read Heather Havrilesky’s “Foreverland” and I’m convinced you’ll want to after this.

Let me set the scene here: O-dark-thirty on a cold December morning and I spotted a headline in the New York Times that said: “Why Marriage Requires Amnesia.”

Thirty-something years into my own marriage I thought: “Amen, sister!” and proceeded to read on.

What is it like to share another human's habitat till death do you part? What is it like to lash yourself to someone else’s raft and set sail for seas that will be both stormy and intermittently serene?

Havrilesky writes tartly and affectionately of her husband Bill: the airhorn sneezes he lets loose, the constant phlegmy throat clearing, the “scorching clarity” of his dear and irritating face, the mundane and often maddening familiarity of it all.

In her new book, she confides: “We talk about marriage like it’s just something people do, no big deal. We pretend that once you’re married, you’re either happy or unhappy, a binary system, on or off. But the truth is so much murkier and also more frightening and exciting and joyful than that.”

Part memoir with overtones of the sassy advice column the author writes, the book is full of vivid, funny, endearing and sometimes dark meditations on marriage and kids.

“This book,” she writes, “represents my personal attempt to understand why I signed myself up for the world’s most impossible endurance challenge.”

And the result is sharp-tongued, deeply perceptive and laugh-out-loud funny. You can listen to my interview with Havrilesky on this week's Big Books and Bold Ideas show.  

— Kerri Miller | MPR News