2 minute read
Novel setting
BOOK REVIEW
Heather Havrilesky, the advice columnist who writes the “Ask Polly” column on Substack, and previously authored “What If This Were Enough?,” “How to Be a Person in the World” and “Disaster Preparedness.” She has written for “The New Yorker,” the “New York Times Magazine,” and APR’s “All Thing Considered.” “Good Morning America,” “Good Housekeeping” and “Publishers Weekly” all recommend this book because it’s “funny, honest, poignant, sarcastic and illuminating.” One-half of all marriages in America end in divorce, and yet many of us cling to one mate for life. Why? In this book, Heather Havrilesky focuses on the delights and calamities over her 15 years of marriage, a drop in the bucket compared to my own 52 years. But she eloquently discusses the energy required to keep love aflame. It’s exhausting, it’s taxing, and worst of all, it accompanies one’s own aging. The tone of the book is confessional but also wise, witty and written with a self-deprecating sense of humor. The Associated Press says it’s a wonder that Heather can turn the divine tedium of her marriage into a “rollicking adventure for her readers too.” Havrilesky discusses motherhood, growing older, coping with both boredom and exhilaration, rejoicing in the joys of finding the one and only, and then bearing the woes of putting up with him. She shares anecdotes from her own marriage to make the book a love letter to marriage because the qualities that make us unique are really what we end up loving in our choice of mates. She opens up about her life, marriage and family, and the reader cannot help but compare hers to the reader’s own. But then an epiphany occurs, and the author realizes that “when the end comes, no matter what, it’ll be happy. I feel in every cell how lucky I was, how lucky we were, to have found each other.” And isn’t that the most any of us can ask of a marriage and a life together in Foreverland?
“Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage” By Heather Havrilesky by Kathy A. Megyeri
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