Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike—it’s the unhappy families who provide differentiation. Maybe the same is true of marriages: the happy ones follow a mostly similar arc—it’s the marital implosions that attract our interest.

Rick Moody’s The Long Accomplishment, his second memoir and first book since the exemplary novel Hotels of North America (2015), follows from the disastrous dissolution of his first marriage into an emotionally fulfilling second marriage. The memoir chronicles a fraught year of mishaps and complications that might have undone the bonds of many of Moody’s contemporaries: toxic fumes in the couple’s apartment and robberies staged in their upstate New York refuge. They suffer fertility woes and family needs. Moody spares little detail in his effort to make sense of this second start into matrimony, with artist Laurel Nakadate, and the litany of unceasing misfortunes during such a short time frame, might also have served as a Woody Allen farce.

“I had been thinking,” Moody explains, “about what to write after Hotels of North America. Given what Laurel and I had gone through in that year, fiction, as a muscle, seemed to have atrophied. Yet, in moments of great grief, as before with my sister’s death in the 1990s, writing has proved a stabilizing force. I just don’t understand things fully until they are put into language. I can write or speak my way through a problem—that’s my way toward comprehension.”

The Long Accomplishment also reckons with the fertility issues he and Laurel faced as a couple: “I thought there might be a way to address infertility as a man. There are fewer accounts,” Moody notes, “from a male perspective.”

In many ways, The Long Accomplishment is a love poem, written in prose, to Laurel. “It’s not,” Moody is quick to say, “a primer about marriage. It’s a specific year: an attempt to provide an account of what makes marriage hospitable.” He laughs. “I did a lousy job with my first marriage. I’ve had a past of self-destructiveness. I’m trying now,” he affirms,” to hold up my part as a husband and a father—and I hope this book describes that effort.”

To that end, the title, culled from a Jack Gilbert poem, titled “The Abnormal Is Not Courage”—read in an abridged form by writer Amy Hempel at the couple’s wedding ceremony in upstate New York—serves as a goal for Moody. The poem’s very title suggests what Hempel wanted to convey at the ceremony: to extol, as Gilbert writes, “normal excellence” in one’s life and marriage, in contrast to the frequent celebrations of more conventional notions of courage against all odds in war.“As a character in the text of my memoir,” Moody notes, “I get the attempt of the Polish cavalry to overrun the German tanks in Gilbert’s poem. That bravery is equivalent to the emotional resources necessary for the strenuousness of marriage.”

The Long Accomplishment addresses the coming together of Moody and Nakadate as first romantic and then wedded partners. Moody’s focus, nonetheless, is on his own version of the truth of their lives and the events that seemed to be marital challenges equivalent to the Biblical tests of Job’s faith. Nakadate’s personal and family history or truth, therefore, is told, as poet Emily Dickinson out it, at a “slant.” “[Laurel] wanted me to make sure I was accurate in the telling and not hurt anyone.” Moody pauses, then continues, “Laurel’s central to the notion of our relationship, but I don’t want to poach on her material. I’m trying to leave space for Laurel to do what she needs with this material. In fact, she’s working on a project about her mother.”

In discussing the moving conclusion of The Long Accomplishment, Moody returns to the primacy of narrative. “A marriage, any marriage, is a collection of stories. These stories have been a way to arrive at a truth.” Moody laughs, “It was hell while it happened but we’re still here.”

J. W. Bonner writes frequently for Kirkus Reviews and teaches writing and the Humanities at Asheville School in North Carolina.