Picked this up on a whim at a used book store and somehow didn't realize it was about cancer. I had just been told the day before that a friend's partner's cancer had returned. The book was spellbinding and heartbreaking. I am always a fan of stories that are not told linearly, although that might be frustrating to some. The author spared no detail in the descriptions of late stages of cancer - difficult to read but obviously more difficult for those who experience the situation as reality not through the safety of reading fiction. What I appreciated most about the book was a glimpse into the unimaginable emotions and experiences those who have a partner or parent with cancer might face. Highly recommended. There have been plenty of summaries written already, so I won't repeat them. Bottom line is I kept waiting to connect with the characters. I normally like whiny, neurotic characters, but Enrique tested my nerves. An artist with extremely fragile ego and a chip on his shoulder to boot. He tells this woman he loves her (twice) practically on the first date, then is resentful when he's soon stuck in a middle-class existence with a baby and wife. I did sympathize with his sexual problems, both before and after the marriage.Margaret is a mystery. We get no real sense of what her interests were, aside from discussing strollers and doing some private painting. (Really? The woman worked at Newsweek. It isn't like she didn't have outside influences.) We are told she wasn't much of a conversationalist. She is controlling. Her teeth needed to be bonded (this is mentioned more than once.) He makes sure to point out she was better educated, but not as clever as he was and without much of a sense of humor. There's a streak of competitiveness and a whiff of wounded emasculation coming from the author at all times, from his impotence during their early courtship to later, when his in-laws buy him a house when his novels aren't selling.The chapters on Margaret's death are moving and scary. Even there, though, I feel the authors tries very hard to emphasize how hard he worked for his wife. I never got the feeling he actually fell in love with HER again, as he says. It felt more like he fell in love with himself and his new image as her strong savior.I also feel the Yglesias did his wife a disservice by revealing his affair after she died. He said on NPR he waited to write a book about marriage until she was dead. Well, if my husband revealed an year-long affair with my old college buddy - and told all the gory details of my bodily functions as I died of cancer - even after I died, I'd come back to haunt him. With the shots taken at his mother-in-law and his own mother, also dead, I can't help but wonder if this book was a long, not-so-subtle screw you to the women in his life.
Do You like book Happy Marriage (2000)?
what a study of marriage....and the art of dying. pretty amazing (and terribly sad).
—cocojadejazz
Not an easy read, but so moving and beautiful and raw and honest.
—Jadee1
Half way into this novel. It is beautiful, and devastating.
—MissABC
