An engaging, candid, relatable memoir of love and marriage.
The author and longtime New York Magazine “Ask Polly” advice columnist trains her incisive eye on her own marriage.
“I’m old and you’re old and nothing new is ever going to happen to us!” Havrilesky tells her husband, Bill, late in the book. “We’ll just get older and older and everything will stay exactly the same until we’re dead.” She shares this pessimistic and yet relatable sentiment after recounting a mild attempt at an extramarital flirtation that went awry, a development that was surprisingly crushing to her. The “tedium” in the subtitle is part of what fuels Havrilesky’s ambivalence toward the project of marriage—that and the fact that “even after years of careful training, a spouse will still do whatever a spouse feels like doing.” In Bill’s case that means making unappealing noises, interrupting, and wearing golf shirts, “perhaps the least attractive article of clothing available to humankind.” The author takes readers through the relationship chronologically, beginning with the honeymoon phase, in which she and Bill had copious amounts of sex and watched a lot of TV. Then it’s on to marriage and the births of their children, which prompted their questionable decision to move to the suburbs in order to avoid the “progressive elites” in their Los Angeles neighborhood. Alongside her chronicle, the author offers running commentary on how the marriage has adapted—or failed to adapt—to life’s vicissitudes. For her part, Havrilesky honestly serves up her own flaws for the reader’s perusal; for example, she describes herself as a “wise guru type who knows everything about everything…about as appealing a mate as Jabba the Hutt.” Meanwhile, Bill comes off quite well, though the author describes his annoying habits in perhaps too much detail. There are times when Havrilesky’s interest in writing ambitious prose or making a metaphor work get in the way of her narrative, but overall, this is a delightfully quirky memoir that refreshingly dissects the institution of marriage.
An engaging, candid, relatable memoir of love and marriage.Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-298446-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 19, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.
Fremont (After Long Silence, 1999) continues—and alters—her story of how memories of the Holocaust affected her family.
At the age of 44, the author learned that her father had disowned her, declaring her “predeceased”—or dead in his eyes—in his will. It was his final insult: Her parents had stopped speaking to her after she’d published After Long Silence, which exposed them as Jewish Holocaust survivors who had posed as Catholics in Europe and America in order to hide multilayered secrets. Here, Fremont delves further into her tortured family dynamics and shows how the rift developed. One thread centers on her life after her harrowing childhood: her education at Wellesley and Boston University, the loss of her virginity to a college boyfriend before accepting her lesbianism, her stint with the Peace Corps in Lesotho, and her decades of work as a lawyer in Boston. Another strand involves her fraught relationship with her sister, Lara, and how their difficulties relate to their father, a doctor embittered after years in the Siberian gulag; and their mother, deeply enmeshed with her own sister, Zosia, who had married an Italian count and stayed in Rome to raise a child. Fremont tells these stories with novelistic flair, ending with a surprising theory about why her parents hid their Judaism. Yet she often appears insensitive to the serious problems she says Lara once faced, including suicidal depression. “The whole point of suicide, I thought, was to succeed at it,” she writes. “My sister’s completion rate was pathetic.” Key facts also differ from those in her earlier work. After Long Silence says, for example, that the author grew up “in a small city in the Midwest” while she writes here that she grew up in “upstate New York,” changes Fremont says she made for “consistency” in the new book but that muddy its narrative waters. The discrepancies may not bother readers seeking psychological insights rather than factual accuracy, but others will wonder if this book should have been labeled a fictionalized autobiography rather than a memoir.
A vivid sequel that strains credulity.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982113-60-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.
A collection of affirmations, noncloying and often provocative, about the things that make justice worth fighting for and life worth living.
Gay—a poet whose last book, the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, bears the semantically aligned title Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude (2015)—is fully aware that all is not well in the world: “Racism is often on my mind,” he writes by way of example. But then, he adds, so are pop music, books, gardening, and simple acts of kindness, all of which simple pleasures he chronicles in the “essayettes” that make up this engaging book. There is much to take delight in, beginning with the miraculous accident of birth, his parents, he writes, a “black man, white woman, the year of Loving v. Virginia, on a stolen island in the Pacific, a staging ground for American expansion and domination.” As that brief passage makes clear, this is not a saccharine kind of delight-making but instead an exercise in extracting the good from the difficult and ugly. Sometimes this is a touch obvious: There’s delight of a kind to be found in the odd beauty of a praying mantis, but perhaps not when the mantis “is holding in its spiky mitts a large dragonfly, which buzzed and sputtered, its big translucent wings gleaming as the mantis ate its head.” Ah, well, the big ones sometimes eat the little ones, and sometimes we’re left with holes in our heads, an idiom that Gay finds interesting if also sad: “that usage of the simile implies that a hole in the head, administered by oneself, might be a reasonable response.” No, the reasonable response is, as Gay variously enumerates, to resist, enjoy such miracles as we can, revel in oddities such as the “onomatopoeicness of jenky,” eat a pawpaw whenever the chance to do so arises, water our gardens, and even throw up an enthusiastic clawed-finger air quote from time to time, just because we can.
An altogether charming and, yes, delightful book.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61620-792-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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