I like to think I have a healthy marriage. Still, there's this part of me that wonders why marriages go wrong and if I'm doing those things. This book was remarkable. There is infidelity. There is an exhaustive list of how one partner is not carrying their weight. There are many pleas to God to heal what is broken. What I liked about this book was the author's search for meaning through his faith. There are a bunch of Bible quotes, but they are illustrative of the struggles this family is going through and their questioning of God for allowing this to happen to them. The book is about personal responsibility, faith, and forgiveness. It made me sad for this couple and then relieved that they didn't have a magical happily ever after. They have a work in progress happily ever after. I think it's worth the read if you are questioning God or going through a season of unrest. The book is beautifully written and full of human-ness, which is a win in any book I read.
Review by Linda B.
How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scot Key
Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, tells the shocking, "shot through with sharp humor" (The Washington Post), spiritually profound story of his journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.
One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife--the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman "who's spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church"--is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking events in How to Stay Married, casting our narrator onto "the factory floor of hell," where his wife was now in love with a man who "wears cargo shorts, on purpose." What will he do? Kick her out? Set fire to all her panties in the yard? Beat this man to death with a gardening implement? Ask God for help in winning her back?
Armed only with a sense of humor and a hunger for the truth, Harrison embarks on a hellish journey into his past, seeking answers to the riddles of faith and forgiveness. Through an absurd series of escalating confessions and betrayals, Harrison reckons with his failure to love his wife in the ways she needed most, resolves to fight for his family, and in a climax almost too ridiculous to be believed, finally learns that love is no joke. "A fiercely memorable account of marital devotion against all odds" (Publishers Weekly, starred review), How to Stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild ride through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.