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A Happy Marriage

by Rafael Yglesias

3.75 · rating details · 1,077 ratings · 339 reviews

A stunningly candid and revelatory love story by an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter whose return to fiction after a long hiatus will be heralded by critics and readers.

In the 1970s Yglesias's first novels, written while he was a teenager, were hailed by critics as the arrival of a young American genius. "A Happy Marriage," his first novel in thirteen years, i

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Hardcover, 384 pages

Published July 7th 2009 by Scribner (first published June 30th 2009)

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Oct 07, 2010

Vanessa rated it

It was a Sunday morning and my husband returned from his habitual coffee outing. I saw his car pull up outside and I expected him to walk through the front door a moment later, but he didn’t. Looking through the front window, I saw him sitting in his car, head bowed. Ten minutes later he came in, glassy-eyed and solemn-faced, and he embraced me. What could have affected my normally cheerful and talkative spouse in such a way? Had he just been to see Inception again? No – he’d just finished ...moreIt was a Sunday morning and my husband returned from his habitual coffee outing. I saw his car pull up outside and I expected him to walk through the front door a moment later, but he didn’t. Looking through the front window, I saw him sitting in his car, head bowed. Ten minutes later he came in, glassy-eyed and solemn-faced, and he embraced me. What could have affected my normally cheerful and talkative spouse in such a way? Had he just been to see Inception again? No – he’d just finished Rafael Yglesias’s A Happy Marriage.

And so I had to read it too. I had already listened to Terry Gross’s interview with the author on NPR’s Fresh Air and thought the book sounded interesting – an account of his marriage, bouncing back and forth between its beginning, when he and his wife first meet as twenty-somethings in 1975 Manhattan, to its end, when his wife dies after a 2 ½ year battle with bladder cancer. The story is written as a fictional novel: the author's wife’s name is unchanged though he has dubbed himself “Enrique”, and presumably several other names have been changed to protect the innocent/guilty or avoid litigation.

Having lived through two close family members' prolonged deaths from cancer, I have to say that Yglesias describes the entire end-of-life process though the eyes of the soon-to-be-bereaved beautifully. But there is other wonderful stuff in here – he has boldly bared himself to the reader, letting us see into his sweet, romantic and insecure heart as a young man, his selfish, unthinking and deceitful self as a young father, and finally the mature, thoughtful and caring soul that he gains through a 29-marriage to his wife. The entire book was very well-written and highly readable – a page-turner even, but this was the stuff that I appreciated most about it, i.e., how Yglesias shows us who he was and now is, essence unchanged but enriched and made better by a loving relationship with his life partner.

This would be a great book club read, with several points for heated discussion in its pages, though I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to read a book that might spark their own internal exploration of what their relationships have given them.
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Jan 29, 2012

Literella rated it

Shelves: leseliste-2012

Inhalt:
Enrique und Margaret sind ein Ehepaar, doch leidet Margaret unter einer unheilbaren Krebserkrankung und die beiden machen sich nun auf ihren Abschied bereit.

Meine Meinung:
Wer einen spannungsgeladenen Schmöker lesen möchte, sollte ganz schnell weitersurfen und sich ein anderes Buch aussuchen. Spannend ist dieses Buch wirklich nicht! Es ist lediglich bezaubernd, emotionsgeladen und sehr stimmungsvoll.
Der Autor beschreibt abwechselnd die Beziehung zwischen den beiden...moreInhalt:
Enrique und Margaret sind ein Ehepaar, doch leidet Margaret unter einer unheilbaren Krebserkrankung und die beiden machen sich nun auf ihren Abschied bereit.

Meine Meinung:
Wer einen spannungsgeladenen Schmöker lesen möchte, sollte ganz schnell weitersurfen und sich ein anderes Buch aussuchen. Spannend ist dieses Buch wirklich nicht! Es ist lediglich bezaubernd, emotionsgeladen und sehr stimmungsvoll.
Der Autor beschreibt abwechselnd die Beziehung zwischen den beiden Protagonisten und die Endphase von Margarets Krankheit. Er bedient sich dabei der gesamten Bandbreite an Emotionen von Trauer, Wut, über Humor bis hin zur Liebe. So begleitet der Leser Enrique in der unsicheren Phase des Kennenlernens, des ersten Kusses, des Eingestehens von Schwächen, der Hochzeit, der wahnsinnig verliebten Phase und auch beim Meistern von Problemen, wächst nach und nach mit den Charakteren zusammen und lernt sie kennen und lieben.
Der Alltag der Beiden, erst jeder für sich, dann in der Beziehung und später dann im gemeinsamen Eheleben, ist sehr glaubhaft dargestellt. Die emotionalen Momente wechseln sich mit den nüchternen und rationalen Dingen ab, sodass man immer das Gefühl hat ein wirklich glaubhaftes Bild eines gemeinsamen Lebens präsentiert zu bekommen.
Das Ende, die Zeit des Abschieds, ist natürlich sehr traurig und ergreifend, allerdings wird alles auch von einer großen Portion Nüchternheit überlagert, die der Tod nun einmal mit sich bringt. Viele Dinge müssen noch geregelt und geplant werden. Somit rutscht die Handlung nicht ins Kitschige, zu Rührselige ab. Und gerade in diesem Alltag, der den nahen Tod überlagert lag für mich das Besondere. Eine Person verliert den wichtigsten Menschen im Leben, man erwartet, dass irgendetwas gravierendes, Weltveränderndes geschieht oder zumindest die Erde für einen Moment stehen bleibt, aber nein. Alles geht seinen gewohnten Gang, nur dass da auf einmal eine Lücke ist, die nur für wenige Menschen sichtbar ist. Gerade das hat mich letztlich dazu gebracht ein paar Tränen zu verdrücken.

Fazit:
Ein Buch voller Emotionen, das trotzdem die ganze Zeit über nicht aufgesetzt oder gezwungen traurig oder gar lustig wirkt. Es besticht nicht durch übermäßige Spannung, sondern durch seine Charaktere und durch die wirklich sehr gut getroffene Alltäglichkeit und einer für mich perfekten Mischung aus Gefühl und Rationalität. Sehr lesenswert.(less)

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Jan 18, 2012

Shauna rated it

“He expected when she woke up, that they would start talking in a way they never had, in a way they now must, about their marriage.”

This sentence from the book illuminates the sadness and irony of the title. To friends and acquaintances, to family, this is ‘a happy marriage.’ Perhaps even to each other, it’s considered ‘a happy marriage.’ But, if their souls can’t or don’t communicate, if they can’t or don’t talk about difficulties and struggles, can it be ‘a happy marriage?'

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Sep 28, 2011

Kristen rated it

This is a hard book to review. It’s not the sort of book I’m typically drawn to, but I heard the novelist interviewed on NPR and my interest was piqued. It’s a fictionalized version of the author’s own life and 30-year marriage with his wife Margaret, who passed away from cancer in 2004. It’s billed as a ‘warts and all’ look at a marriage, and Iglesias has the story jump back and forth from when he first met his wife at age 21, to her last weeks as she dies from cancer. It sort of meets in the m...moreThis is a hard book to review. It’s not the sort of book I’m typically drawn to, but I heard the novelist interviewed on NPR and my interest was piqued. It’s a fictionalized version of the author’s own life and 30-year marriage with his wife Margaret, who passed away from cancer in 2004. It’s billed as a ‘warts and all’ look at a marriage, and Iglesias has the story jump back and forth from when he first met his wife at age 21, to her last weeks as she dies from cancer. It sort of meets in the middle of their life, which even includes his one-year affair with one of his wife’s friends while their first son was young.

I guess part of the challenge is that I feel like I’m reviewing someone’s life, not a novel. I’m in no place to judge someone else’s marriage. As a novel, I found the places that I felt like I wanted more was actually around the affair and its aftermath. Ultimately he decides to stay with his wife because he feels it’s the right thing to do for his son. And over the course of the book you see how deeply he falls in love with his wife once again, but he details little of what made him fall back in love with his wife. He also makes a point of saying that he never told his wife about the affair before she passed – he meant to, but never had the right moment. You wonder if he did her a kindness or not. I thought the two of them were very real people, who even though they lived a life of privilege had the same quirks, flaws, and beautiful qualities that so many of us have. And ultimately the novel is about the fact that he was a man who spent his whole life trying to build a name for himself as a novelist, but the best thing he ever created in his life was his marriage and his two sons – they were the real purpose and accomplishments of his life, and the best thing he will leave behind. Not his career. And I think that’s a theme that resonates with a lot of us. I don’t feel like you need to be married to appreciate this novel – in essence it is a novel about the relationships (romantic, platonic, or familial) that define your life. And it shows how God forsakenly awful cancer is.
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Mar 24, 2011

nicole rated it

Shelves: 2011

You know right off the bat this book is going to be sad. It doesn't mince words. At the end of the book, Margaret is going to die. And the author's wife really died of cancer, so this is only one foot in fiction. Many reviews use the word expansive to politely describe this, but I felt it to be staggering. The book physically became harder to hold as certain scenes were retold. The depth of details as she fell apart. The constant return to the present day after being gloriously ingrained in the ...more

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Sep 27, 2010

Julie rated it

Beautiful, heartbreaking, and provocative . . . a brutally honest story told with such raw emotion that brought tears to my eyes several times (many while I was in public - I read this book on the plane and while waiting in airports :-). Anyone who is in a marriage or long term relationship will relate to these characters and their lives . . . from the euphoria surrounding those first dates and wanting more than anything just to be with the other person, to learning to live with and love someon...moreBeautiful, heartbreaking, and provocative . . . a brutally honest story told with such raw emotion that brought tears to my eyes several times (many while I was in public - I read this book on the plane and while waiting in airports :-). Anyone who is in a marriage or long term relationship will relate to these characters and their lives . . . from the euphoria surrounding those first dates and wanting more than anything just to be with the other person, to learning to live with and love someone you're not sure you may "like" and contemplating if the relationship is even worth it, to truly understanding how your partner has shaped your life and added a treasured and complete dimension to your incomplete self.

The clarity and understanding I felt while reading this book is profound, I connected on a such a deep level it's difficult to explain. The reason I gave it 4 stars rather than 5, was the writing, which at times became too cliche and repetitive in it's descriptions. I'm also not sure if I really liked the final two pages, I thought he would wrap it up differently. That aside, here are a couple of passages that touched my heart:

" . . . He felt relief, a long sigh of gratitude that the race had been run, that for all his mistakes, for all his failures, for all the wear and tear he had doled out, for all that he had smashed and given away of love and good intentions and grand ambitions, for all his errors there had been an unexpected mercy, and he had not been punished. Life had given him Margaret to make him whole."

"Enrique finally felt able to explain what she had come to mean in his life. He was ready to articulate that in their twenty-nine years together both of them had been transformed, not once but three times; that he had come not only to need her but to love her more profoundly than ever: not as a trophy to be won, not as a competitor to defeat, not as a habit too long to break, but as a full partner, skin of his skin, head of his heart, and heart of his soul."

Word of WARNING: strong language and adult situations. Just thought I'd put that out there for those that are sensitive, which I am, but was able to manage my sensitivity while reading this book :-).(less)

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Jul 28, 2010

Jenny rated it

What I loved best about this book was the structure and the honesty with which the story was told. The whole thing's about a marriage, and Yglesias ricochets back and forth between young and old with each chapter. What kept happening was this: The protagonist's wife is on her deathbed and I am bawling, and it is tender and gut-wrenchingly sad, and suddenly, new chapter! They're young again, just meeting. He is 21 and nervous as hell. He is completely endearing and she is exciting, and there...more

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Oct 27, 2009

Karen Reed rated it

A heart-wrenching and insightful examination of the author's long, (although cut short by cancer) and fruitful, albeit sometimes fraught, marriage. Also, it is an interesting window into the male mind and how their ego, better-their sense of self, is informed and even formed by the most significant women in their lives. Because this book is so intensely personal and mimics, we can only guess extremely closely, the author's actual experience, I sometimes was left wanting more and I got the feeli...more

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Oct 13, 2009

Richard rated it

I had high hopes for this book after I heard an interview with the author and even (foolishly) gave a copy of it to my father as it was portrayed as a husband and wife’s struggle with her ending years and her final days as she dies of cancer.

The title is misleading, I think, as the book largely alternates between the first year of Enrique’s marriage to Margaret (Yeglesias’s wife real name) and the last several years of their life together. But while the writing is often rich, especi...more

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Aug 31, 2009

Michelle rated it

This was a beautiful book. I had to think about the number of stars. Though I wouldn't quite give it amazing, that being reserved for books like War & Peace, that are really life-changing, I think it deserves more than "really liked it."

This is a painful book, a book that made me cry, but not in an ET sort of way. By the time the wife dies at the end of the novel (not a spoiler; it's clear from the beginning that this is her last week of life) Yglesias has brought us throug...more

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Aug 30, 2009

Jonathan rated it

This is a stunning evocation of thirty year marriage. Using short vignettes, the author moves back and forth between his courtship of the woman who becomes his wife and his attending her, more than thirty years later, as she faces a terminal illness. (There are a few moments, along the way, included as well).

In lesser hands, perhaps, this would be a heavy handed, contrived literary "device", but the structure serves Yglesias's purpose brilliantly. There is profound con...more

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Jul 10, 2009

Diane rated it

4.5/5 stars

The story A Happy Marriage begins in the 1970's when Enrique Sabas meets Margaret Cohen, who becomes his future wife. The two come from different backgrounds, but despite that, there is an immediate attraction.

Told in alternating chapters, it is a poignant story. It covers their dating tears, their marriage and other import events in their lives, which includes touching and compassionate detail about Margaret's battle with cancer, her ultimate demise and her h...more4.5/5 stars

The story A Happy Marriage begins in the 1970's when Enrique Sabas meets Margaret Cohen, who becomes his future wife. The two come from different backgrounds, but despite that, there is an immediate attraction.

Told in alternating chapters, it is a poignant story. It covers their dating tears, their marriage and other import events in their lives, which includes touching and compassionate detail about Margaret's battle with cancer, her ultimate demise and her husband's devotion to her throughout.

It was not a perfect marriage, there were disappointments and financial challenges along the way, but it was portrayed as a "happy Marriage" which seemed to grow deeper when the reality set in for Enrique that her would indeed be losing his wife to this dreaded disease.

Throughout the novel there was this amazing use of foreshadowing which I found very effective. The characters were real, and developed in a way that will stay with me for a long time to come. I found it particularly touching when Enrique was making final arrangements for Margaret's death, and although there were many passages I had to stop and reread a second time, this one left me teary eyed, (as it reminded me of something my mother did when I cared for her as she was dying).......

"She wants to go in oblivious peace, he thought, looking down at the profile that appeared on the sheet's edge. That morning an alert Margaret had announced that she completed her last chore, choosing her burial clothes. He understood now that when she has asked to go to her grave wearing the earrings he bought her for her birthday, she meant that to be her goodbye to him, her last words of approval and gratitude. She had spoken and he did not answer."

A deep, passionate love story of a marriage through sickness and in health. Although this one is a work of fiction, the story was inspired by the author's relationship with his wife Margaret who passed away in 2004. The author was a high school drop out who published his first novel in 1972 at the age of 17. He is the author of nine books. RECOMMENDED

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Jul 31, 2011

Sheri rated it

A different take on a somewhat similar story told by Lionel Shriver in "So Much For That." "A Happy Marriage" is a back-n-forth chronology of the relationship of a couple married 30 years before the wife's death from cancer. Chapters set in the final months, weeks, days and even hours before her death are juxtaposed with chapters about the couple meeting, their first date, their early dating relationship, and one major bump in the road of their marriage. Two compelling the...more

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Jul 09, 2009

Lauren rated it

A Happy Marriage, at many times, is the story of anything but a Happy Marriage. The novel is about Enrique Sabas, a struggling half-Jewish, half-Latino writer living in New York City and Margaret Cohen, his ivy league educated wife. The novel opens in 1975 with Enrique meeting Margaret. He immediately is attracted to Margaret and in alternating chapters, the novel tells the story of how Enrique and Margaret became a couple. Woven in the novel is the story of Margaret's battle with cancer, told r...moreA Happy Marriage, at many times, is the story of anything but a Happy Marriage. The novel is about Enrique Sabas, a struggling half-Jewish, half-Latino writer living in New York City and Margaret Cohen, his ivy league educated wife. The novel opens in 1975 with Enrique meeting Margaret. He immediately is attracted to Margaret and in alternating chapters, the novel tells the story of how Enrique and Margaret became a couple. Woven in the novel is the story of Margaret's battle with cancer, told retrosepctively as she prepares to die, having exhausted all medical options. Throughout the novel, Enrique reflects on his marriage. Enrique and Margaret's marriage is a reminder that often, the only difference between marriages that last 25 years and those that don't is that the latter marriages ended in divorce.

The novel is poignant, the writing descriptive. There isn't a lot of action - the plot centering on Enrique's feelings about Margaret the girl, Margaret his wife, and the stresses of supporting his family as a writer. Enrique is often whiny, Margaret demanding. Both are self-absorbed and rather unlikeable at times. The novel is very realistic and unapologetic about both Enrique's emotions during his 29 year relationship with Margaret and his feelings as he watches Margaret's often disgusting degeneration at the end of her life. The novel does not spare graphic details of death-by-cancer. Nor does it spare Enrique's seemingly endless whining and self-pity as he transforms into the devoted husband to his dying wife.

Overall this is a 3 star novel. For some reason it didn't grab me. I found "the end" to be overly drawn out. Enrique and Margaret were a little too real, too selfish, and too disappointing. Not only was the description of cancer depressing, so too was the description of marriage itself. Finally, some of Enrique's descriptions of his in-laws border on the antisemitic. In essence, this is a good novel because the writing is good, but it isn't really a good story.

(AMAZON VINE)(less)

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Feb 06, 2011

Debbie rated it

Recommended to Debbie by: Brenda Kring

I am not the type to read books about love or loss. I can honestly say I would have never read this book if my book club had not chosen it for February.

At the beginning, I was irritated by the organization of the story, which alternates chapters between Enrique and Margaret's preparations for Margaret's death and their courtship 30 years earlier. I really wanted to read sequentially, especially once Yglesias started skipping over the answers to the questions I had at the end of some ...more

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May 31, 2011

Kristen rated it

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I had never heard of this book and was not looking for a book for myself the last time I was in Politics and Prose (to buy a gift). But this book jumped off the shelf at me and despite the fact that I had never heard of the author and had not even added it to my "to-read" list, it looked too interesting to leave there. And I'm so glad I picked it up!

The tragic story is beautifully crafted -- alternating between vignettes of a young, healthy, not-always-happy (but mostly-i...moreI had never heard of this book and was not looking for a book for myself the last time I was in Politics and Prose (to buy a gift). But this book jumped off the shelf at me and despite the fact that I had never heard of the author and had not even added it to my "to-read" list, it looked too interesting to leave there. And I'm so glad I picked it up!

The tragic story is beautifully crafted -- alternating between vignettes of a young, healthy, not-always-happy (but mostly-in-love) couple and the final weeks of the wife's life as her loving husband cares for her and honors her final wishes. At the end of the book, I felt like it was a friend of the family who had died, I felt that I knew them both so well. The author does a fantastic job of describing the pain of the end-of-life decisions the couple must face and of conveying the panic in living every moment of those final days to the fullest. And it is not at all incongruous that he intersperses these final days with stories of trials and triumphs in the couple's dating and married life.

I don't think my review can do this book justice. I loved his descriptions. I was sad to think that most of this book was likely based on his true story with his own wife. After I finished the book I read some other reviews and learned that Yglesias had been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air and I wanted to listen to the interview before posting my review. It turns out that the majority of the book is, in fact, a true story and that he wrote it as fiction to give himself some creative license -- particularly in remembering dialogue from 30 years prior -- but that it was more true than I had imagined. The interview is available here. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story... I would suggest listening to it after reading the book, though, because although the end is not a surprise, it is better to have the experience through the book first and then to hear the back story. One thing that surprised me about the interview is that they focused so much on the act of caring for a loved one whose body has failed her, and who has endured a bunch of very extreme and repulsive interventions to enable her to keep living. I found it much less surprising that a spouse would not be repulsed by his partner's body than the interviewer did, and I was sad that she focused more on that than she did on the beauty of the descriptions and the images of love that jump off the pages, despite revelations that the marriage had not always been an easy or pleasant one.

My only criticism is that, especially at the beginning, some tighter copy editing would have prevented some grammar mistakes and some duplicated descriptions. (Descriptions that seemed apt or catchy the first time, seemed trite the second or third time I read them...) But the book is so powerful that this will not be my most prominent memory of it.(less)

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Apr 03, 2011

Karen rated it

Shelves: fiction

This book came to me from blog hopping online one day. The author wrote a blog post and I liked his writing so much that I checked out one of his books. It’s a novel that reads like a memoir. It’s based on his real life and follows a couple from before they actually met (from the man’s point of view) through to the ending of the marriage (I won’t give away how, but you will know almost right away). It tells the story in chapters alternating between the courtship and the present ending of their m...more

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Aug 06, 2009

Kelly rated it

“A Happy Marriage” is autobiography thinly disguised as fiction. This is an incredibly moving and intensely literary book. Mr. Ygelsias has written a profoundly personal book, which exhibits his powers as a storyteller in a manner evidencing respect for his audience as well as his subject. This is an astonishing feat, considering that he has included ridiculously personal details of his marriage without seeming to betray the essential emotional intimacies of his married life.

I rea...more

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Jul 05, 2010

Jann Barber rated it

From what I understand, this book is autobiographical. The author dropped out of high school and had his first book published at the age of 17; so did the protagonist. In the book, the wife's name was Margaret and she died after battling cancer; the author's wife was also named Margaret and also died of cancer.
The book was written in alternating chapters. One part of the story was about Margaret's final wishes and her final weeks, alternating with chapters about how the two characters met ...more

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Sep 23, 2009

Stacy rated it

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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Oct 03, 2009

Bookmarks Magazine rated it

Shelves: nov-dec-2009

Yglesias is brutally honest in this deeply personal account of his thorny, but ultimately loving, marriage. He tells the parallel stories of the beginning and the end of this relationship "in something of a tour de force of novelistic architecture" (New York Times), which strikes a fine balance between the heady excitement of budding romance and the agonizing loss of enduring love. Though the story line may seem predictable at first, Yglesias throws in enough twists, surprises, and emo...more

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May 23, 2010

Ceridwen rated it

Recommends it for: husbands, maybe

Recommended to Ceridwen by: Sorry Liz!

Shelves: america-and-environs, fiction, memoir, not-for-me-maybe-for-you, omg-were-all-going-to-die, abandoned, the-housewife

I kind of want just to drop the one-line quip I posted in the comments below as my review, but we all know I'm totally incapable of shutting my face, so here goes nothing. The review was “At least two of the words in the title are wrong.” The title is A Happy Marriage: A Novel.

The first word I have a problem with is “novel”. I watched with great schadenfreude the James Frey take-down for passing his fictions off as reality, and much of my evil glee centered on how self-aggrandizingl...moreI kind of want just to drop the one-line quip I posted in the comments below as my review, but we all know I'm totally incapable of shutting my face, so here goes nothing. The review was “At least two of the words in the title are wrong.” The title is A Happy Marriage: A Novel.

The first word I have a problem with is “novel”. I watched with great schadenfreude the James Frey take-down for passing his fictions off as reality, and much of my evil glee centered on how self-aggrandizingly stupid & trite his life-changing experiences were purported to be. I got hugged by black people! In treatment! And it made me a better man! Bah, you suck. This doesn't commit that sin; it's called a novel. But it's very serious autobiographical nature is trumpeted all over the front and back flaps, all over the text – the wife's name is unchanged, and the husband is from the same odd ethnic mix as the author's. The author and the protagonist have the same early life history: published novelists by the tender age of 16 or 17; thirty year marriage; ugly death by cancer by the wife. I'm assuming the infidelity is the same too, at least insofar as there was one.

I'm not sure why this bothers me, and it certainly might not bother you. Getting peanut butter in one's chocolate sounds like a recipe for a tasty treat. And I pretty much know that even autobiographies – or memoirs, as they are trendily referred to these days – that aren't crafted out of grade-A bullshit are going to be simplified and fictional in some regards, and I'm okay with that. So, I should be happy that this doesn't purport to be fact. Maybe this is my dig: the trumpeting of its autobiographical reality seems to demand my sympathies, seems to collapse the difference between author and protagonist in ways that seem...um...unfair? manipulative? These words aren't exactly right. But it all messes with how I'm reading these ultimately fictional characters, and it kept booting me out of the narrative.

This sort of leads into my next complaint. The phrase of the title, “a happy marriage”, seems deliberately to be riffing on the Tolstoy aphorism, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Okay, I grok you: happiness is not actually all the same, and sometimes it's not even happiness. The worth of a marriage maybe shouldn't be yard-sticked by the unhappinesses caused by the (probably) inevitable failures of us as human beings: infidelity, betrayal by our bodies, being stupid and insensitive to the people we love most. The sections dealing with Rebecca's just godawful experience with cancer were moving & had the hard crunch of lived experience, but while I found their relationship in this section touching & emblematic of the highest ideal of the married state – that one promises to care for another even through hell & cancer, and then actually does that – it can't be called happiness. It's the opposite of happiness; it's misery, but it's a misery predicated on love & honor, and not the trinket kinds of these things, but the real deal. That this incredible act of devotion could be carried out by people who are sometimes jerks, and really big jerks, makes it even more fine.

However. (Here it comes.) This is not about marriage, it's about a husband. Rebecca is not the protagonist; she is the wife. To this I say arrrrrrggghhh. I've got all kinds of bitches in place about Vanishing Wives and the way they are Given No Agency in cultural expectations of marriage & all, and this hit me squarely in the middle of that. And herein may lie my real problem with the sneak autobiography: because he is writing from his own experience, pretty much on a one-to-one scale, with only the names changed to distance a bit, Yglesias commits a pretty darn big gaff by purporting to talk about Marriage when he is really talking about Being a Husband. I think it's an honest mistake, but it's still a pretty big freaking mistake, imao.

Add in the fact that I really can't stand his prose, especially in the (seriously idealized) sections where he first meets Rebecca, and you've got a pretty potent recipe from me never finishing this book. It's possible I'm too sensitive to the marketing and packaging. I know that many authors have no or little say in what a book it titled, or in what goes on the front or back flaps. If this is the case, sorry Mr. Yglesias. As it stands, your book and I are breaking up. (less)

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Dec 12, 2011

Jennifer rated it

I finished the book, which is saying something, and I did appreciate the compelling structure of the novel, which alternates chapters set in the early days of courtship and marriage with those at the end of one spouse's terminal illness. The latter chapters were difficult to read from that standpoint, but they did ring with an element of truth and honesty, amidst the excruciating litany of medical details. How does a couple prepare for an anticipated death? How do they "manage" the gri...more

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Dec 07, 2010

Robert rated it

I'm only giving this book three stars, because it wasn't the kind of beautiful language and poetic imagery that I have come to love in other books. Also, I think it plays to a fairly narrow audience. Otherwise, I would have easily awarded four stars and been tempted to spring for five. The narrow audience includes me and perhaps others who spent their early 20's in the NYC area, dating, looking for a special someone, wondering how their life was going to play out, and what they were going to ...more

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Nov 22, 2010

Bob Bell rated it

This is one of the best books I have ever read, on a subject close to my heart. I am encouraged by the positive reviews after reading one really negative "attack" critique on a professor's blog. Reading the book aloud with my wife, I could not read some of the more emotional, sad parts aloud. Yglesias has done a great job writing about his life with Margaret, novel or memoir, it does not matter. It's clear it wasn't always "happy" for him (Enrique), but the initial passion...more

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Apr 25, 2010

Wanda rated it

Recommends it for: all thoughtful readers

Recommended to Wanda by: my husband

I was torn between allotting this book stars. Four or five. In the end, as terrific as this book is, it is not amazing and I have learned to moderate my “starring” on goodreads. Five stars should be awarded to works that are truly life altering; The Death of Ivan Ilych comes to mind, as does Crime and Punishment, for example.
This is a gorgeous book. It is written for the thoughtful reader. Some reviewers call it sad. Why? Because it is so brutally honest? Since when is a good hard look a...moreI was torn between allotting this book stars. Four or five. In the end, as terrific as this book is, it is not amazing and I have learned to moderate my “starring” on goodreads. Five stars should be awarded to works that are truly life altering; The Death of Ivan Ilych comes to mind, as does Crime and Punishment, for example.
This is a gorgeous book. It is written for the thoughtful reader. Some reviewers call it sad. Why? Because it is so brutally honest? Since when is a good hard look at what constitutes reality sad? This book’s title is “A Happy Marriage” not “A Perfect Marriage.” The author, Rafael Yglesias, is a writer and writers are very precise in their use of language. I am a writer – although not of fiction – and know that words are not chosen haphazardly. Each is chosen precisely to communicate accurately what one wishes to communicate. A word is more than just a word. In the naming of this book, A Happy Marriage, Yglesias wants us to recognize that this story is not about a perfect marriage.
As Abraham Verghese has observed so profoundly in “Cutting for Stone”: “The key to your happiness is to...own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. [Otherwise:] you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny." Given that this novel chronicles Ygesias’ own relationship with his wife, her family, their meeting, and her death, he most certainly has searched for and found happiness by way of “owning.” Not perfection – which does not exist -- but happiness, with all its warts, vagaries, joys and sorrows.
He tells us in his beautifully crafted prose about his in laws: “Dorothy and Leonard – like his parents for him – were not all Margaret wished they could be, but they had found a way to send the aid she required across the embargoed borders of their hearts.” How beautiful and what an powerful image! Imagine, parents that are not perfect, but good, and struggling with their own set of hopes, expectations, and disappointments.
In the telling of his wife’s dying and juxtaposing it with their meeting, he compellingly explores that place between a hope for perfection, and an acceptance and appreciation of what is. In the chapters recounting their courtship, he tells us of his insecurities, his lust, his dreams; and he does so in a way that so much captures a late adolescent, early adult male point of view that it is nothing short of masterful. (I’m not a male, but my husband concurs with this opinion, and he is). In talking about his disappointment that in the early years of their marriage, he tells us that his needs were not uppermost in Margaret’s mind. His needs competed with her career at Newsweek and her role as a young mother; and he is brutal in bringing to light his self absorption which resulted in an affair with Sally. It is clear that during this straying he tried to re-capture what he thought that he had lost with Margaret. The transparency of this telling is cathartic, but also didactic, in that he imparts to us that he learned a valuable lesson from his dalliance – again – that there is no perfect marriage and that the divergence of what we imagine and what we achieve is dependent on our choices alone.
Some will find the graphic descriptions of Margaret’s death a bit much. If you are squeamish, either get over it or don’t read it. I am in the health business, so it did not bother me. This is reality. Dying is not a pretty business, especially in the U.S. where the idea of death and dying is anathema to many in the medical community, and no effort at degradation of the human body is spared in an attempt to prolong life beyond any rationality. But read this folks, if for no other reason than it might spur you to go out and have a talk with your family as to how you want your dying to happen.
While she is dying, Yglesias comes to a greater appreciation of Margaret, and she comes to a better appreciation of him, the depth of his commitment to her, and the strength of her feelings for him.
Friends and family want to sanctify him for taking such good care of Margaret in the face of tubes, bodily fluids and raw suffering. He will have none of it. What he wants them, and us, to understand is that a body is merely a container for food, waste, and pain and that the person him or herself animates that body. This is why he can go about the chores of cleaning up Margaret and look beyond a body, which in his youth was something that he lusted after beyond all reason. Margaret is not her body. He has come to that wisdom.
In the telling of his courtship, marriage, and wife’s death I wonder whether he ever answered what I believe was his question: What makes a happy marriage? I don’t think he ever unlocked that particular mystery but he does leave it to us to ponder and decide for ourselves. The beauty of wonderful fiction, expertly written is that it leaves such questions open, and is respectful enough to understand that we will answer them ourselves and in our own way.
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Jun 07, 2009

Rebecca rated it

Shelves: first-reads

I won the advance reader’s edition of this book on a Goodreads giveaway—thank you Goodreads!—and it immediately exceeded my expectations. I am not a big fan of sad stories and from the beginning you know this book is going to have a sad ending. A Happy Marriage is an autobiographical novel about Yglesias’ relationship with his wife who died of cancer in 2004. Yglesias writes on his blog, “I wrote A Happy Marriage as a frankly autobiographical novel because only by changing the facts could I t...more

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Feb 11, 2011

Shelley rated it

Shelves: novels, books-about-writers

I picked up this novel because I heard it was a testament to the marital bond's capacity to endure life's greatest challenges, including relational strife, infidelity, career failures and disease. The mainstream media isn't always so kind to marriage, so when I discovered this book, I was definitely intrigued.

The novel follows a young writer named Enrique as he meets and falls in love with a woman named Margaret Cohen. The novel spans the thirty years of their marriage, beginning wit...moreI picked up this novel because I heard it was a testament to the marital bond's capacity to endure life's greatest challenges, including relational strife, infidelity, career failures and disease. The mainstream media isn't always so kind to marriage, so when I discovered this book, I was definitely intrigued.

The novel follows a young writer named Enrique as he meets and falls in love with a woman named Margaret Cohen. The novel spans the thirty years of their marriage, beginning with youthful infatuation, making a stop in marital-disillusionment town and then ending, very sadly, with Margret's death from cancer. The book's burden seems to be to stress how the couple's affections matured into unconditional love in the midst of Margaret's battle with cancer; Enrique, didn't realize how much he loved her until he was faced with her impending death.

Sounds like a compelling story, right? Well, that's what I thought.

I have to admit, I didn't really like Enrique. By his own admission, he's defensive, petty, moody and selfish - not exactly the ideal husband. Now, this alone wouldn't necessarily lead me to condemn the book, except that "Enrique" is so transparently Rafael Yglesias!!! One NY Times book reviewer calls the novel "unabashedly autobiographical." The more I learned about the author, the more I was astonished by how autobiographical it is. Both Yglesias and "Enrique" were child prodigies who dropped out of high school to write their first novels, both men are half-Jewish, half-Latino, both married a woman named Margaret who died of cancer, both have author parents, both had dreams of becoming literary sensations but later sold out to write horror film screenplays, the list goes on. The only thing that distinguishes this novel from a somewhat annoying blog is that the point of view is third person, and not first person.

It would be like if I wrote a novel about the life and times of a twenty-eight year old part-time English instructor named "Sheila Birmingham" from Los Angeles who currently lives in Southwest Georgia with her pastor husband named "Martin," her eight month old daughter named "Ariana" and a Boston Terrier named "Francois." Even if someone did want to read such a tale, that would be pretty lame. Why not write a memoir?!?!?!

All right, so maybe you are more charitable than I am and can overlook that. What bothered me even more about the book is that, in a sense, Yglesias undermines the very relationship he is trying to uphold. Everyone knows this book is autobiographical, and, yet, he includes the most intimate, sensitive, provocative details about his wife, including tidbits about their romantic life as well as moments during her fight with cancer that I suspect she wouldn't want people to see. And even if these details are fictional, which I doubt, given that all Yglesias' novels are apparently autobiographical, the author has to know that people will assume they are true, since he doesn't even bother to change his wife's name in the book!!!! All throughout the novel, "Enrique" (a.k.a. Yglesias) laments that his novels remain somewhat obscure. It seems to me that he capitalized on his wife's sad story, and all the intimate details surrounding it, in order to publish a book that would leave more of a lasting impression on society than the screenplay, From Hell. And, sadly, it did. Everyone seems to think this "novel" is great.

And, if that weren't bad enough, there's a certain self-congratulatory tone throughout the whole book, even when "Enrique" is ostensibly admitting his own failures. He spends his whole marriage being a jerk to his poor wife and then pats himself on the back because he manages to muster up the strength to provide basic care for her during her last days on earth. (Upon her death, he also is quite pleased by the fact that she will never know about the affair he had with one of her best friends.) That's so admirable of you, Yglesias...uh, I mean, Enrique! She will never find out, but now everyone else has!!

Despite the fact that the book is dedicated to Margaret, there is something self-serving about the whole thing. I wouldn't recommend it.

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Jan 05, 2010

Erin rated it

This book blew me away. It's an amazing, touching look at how we relate to one another as people and as mates in a relationship. Yglesias takes an average marriage bordering on cliche and makes the story of it so heartwrenchingly beautiful and compelling that I can't yet bring myself to put the book away. I keep opening it up and re-reading certain passages.

I debated giving it 5 stars, and likely should have. But there were times when the narrator's (and, I assume, author's -- since t...more

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Aug 30, 2009

Kasa Cotugno rated it

Shelves: biography-memoir

Rafael Yglesias has employed the artist's approach to working through his pain. In his admittedly autobiographical novel, he presents in alternating chapters the rapturous beginning of new love from his first sighting of his wife, through her ultimate capitulation to cancer, rendered in searing detail and pain, almost 30 years later. While the story is told completely from his point of view, it is hard to get a grasp on the character of his wife. The marriage, while not halcyon all the way throu...more

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Quotes from A Happy Marriage

“Perhaps they assumed that he would have a hard time putting her first. Perhaps they had not understood that for a long time she had come first with him, that for many years she had been his heart's home and his mind's anchor and that fighting to keep her alive was essential to preserving his own soul.” — 4 people liked it

“... and that did it. That brought those depthless blue eyes within a foot, perhaps six inches, maybe even closer, and something happened inside Enrique, like a guitar string suddenly unstrung. There was a shock and a vibration in his heart, a palpable break inside the cavity of his chest. He had dropped out of high school and never took a class in anatomy, but he did know that the cardiovascular system wasn't supposed to react as if it were the source and center of feeling. And yet he would have sworn to all and sundry - not that he expected to admit it to anyone - that Margaret, or at least her bright blue eyes, had just snapped his brittle heart.” — 1 person liked it

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