Married Love: And Other Stories

by Tessa Hadley

"A supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence," (New York Times Book Review), Tessa Hadley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, a New York Times Notable Book. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hadley returns to the short story form in this brilliant collection, her first since the celebrated Sunstroke and Other Stories. Married Love showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, British Literature, Audiobook, Book Club

244 pages, Kindle Edition

First published October 8, 2012

About the author

Tessa Hadley is the author of Sunstroke and Other Stories, and the novels The Past, Late in the Day and Clever Girl. She lives in Cardiff, Wales, and teaches literature and creative writing at Bath Spa University.

Reviews

[Roger Brunyate · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ellipses…

One of the twelve stories in the middle of Tessa Hadley's evocative collection contains a scene in which two people unexpectedly go to bed together. Standard fare for a short-story writer, you might think, but this comes as a surprise. Certainly not because it is graphic—the essential action is offstage—but because Hadley is generally assiduous in avoiding the game-changing moment. A cover quote compares her to Chekhov, though her understated Englishness has no place for muted Slavic hysteria. But she is similar in her penchant for slightly sad comedy and interest in those parts of life in which nothing heroic really happens. She is a master of the poetics of possibility.

Not that her characters do not have sex; they do, but that is seldom what interests her. Here is the beginning of one story, "In the Cave":

After the sex, he fell asleep. That wasn't what Linda had expected. Cheated—returned too soon into her own possession—she lay pinned for a while under his flung arm.

The rest of the story is about Linda getting quietly washed and dressed (maybe to return, maybe not), but Hadley manages to bring two whole lives into the picture and, from one or two tiny details, to hint at basic philosophies on which relationships can thrive or founder. Her gifts as a writer do not show in rich descriptions but in emotional perception; "returned too soon into her own possession" is a marvelous phrase, and quietly devastating.

"In the Country," one of the longer stories, begins with the kind of premise you might expect from Penelope Lively: two family photographs, taken a year apart, with only minor differences between them. The story recalls the weekend at the house in the country when the earlier portrait was taken; there is little drama, just the ordinary interactions of a four-generation family; but the reader is waiting to find out which of the differences in the photos will indeed turn out to be minor, and which significant.

But generally the stories are more open-ended than Lively's. The title tale begins with a music student announcing to her parents that she is getting married to a much older (and much married) professor, but it is less the event that matters, so much as what it will come to reveal of the dynamics of marriages in general, whether failed, successful, or merely tolerable. Another story has two lovers from university visiting each other's parents, encountering differences in lifestyle and expectations. Again, there are no surprises, just questions and reflections. Four of the stories concern people who knew each other as children or adolescents; no buried secrets or ticking time-bombs; the point is simply the ways in which people move on.

Earlier this year, in A Possible Life, Sebastian Faulks wrote a series of stories in which significant events are followed by long lives in which very little happens; I found his afterstories often more moving than the dramas that preceded them. So I was well primed to appreciate Tessa Hadley, for whom the true story lies less in events than the ellipses between them... connecting a few exquisitely observed moments... to the rest of life....

[Tatevik · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am somehow a novel reader and choose short stories in exceptional conditions. Maybe because I love to be involved in a long story that is deep, with multiple layers, giving me time to get to know the people, their lives. So, I wasn’t too “experienced” in short stories when I took in my hands this particular edition. I am not new to Hadley’s prose and each book I read from her was somehow a study of her writing technics. I was astonished by the way she had in mind how the short story should be written.

“The flow of the story finding its way to its end should feel as unpredictable as a sequence of events in life itself (Colm Tóibín is so right when he says that the flow is more like music than argument). The end isn't contained in a story's beginning; it should surpass it.”<\i>

And I loved this.

She also has this trick of giving you some ideas at first and you carry on in your mind, then she closes the story in her way as if mocking you “you and your imaginative mind! Wait, I have other plans.” Now when I am thinking, she does the same trick in novels, but as the storyline is longer, it’s less apparent and not a slap to the face.

I loved her short stories and the style, I still have 2 stories collection from her to enjoy!

As always, she’s writing about life as is with its ups and downs, stories that are part of realistic life.

[Bonnie · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘He knew how passionately she succumbed to the roles she dreamed up for herself. She won’t be able to get out of this one, he thought. She can’t stop now.’

Married Love: And Other Stories is a collection of short fictional contemporary stories. Married Love is not all about domestic bliss. It's about the every day struggles that the characters encounter. Each story is a showcasing of a brief moment that manages to convey an entire life without leaving one feeling incomplete by the shortness of it.

'For a moment, however, she could imagine the sensation of chewing politely and sufferingly on a mouthful of broken crystal, tasting salty blood.'

Reviewing a collection of short stories is always difficult. Do you review each one individually? Do you rate them as a whole? All in all, the characters within her stories are strongly written and despite the fact that I certainly preferred a few more than others they all managed to shine in their own way. Her writing was stately and succinct and quite enjoyable. My interest has definitely been piqued and I would love to read more from this author.

'I couldn't help being swept along by the idea of someone changing who she was: I knew I wasn't capable of this; I was just helplessly forever me.'

[Martha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tessa Hadley is a master story teller and this collection is a gem. I savored each story, but was especially smitten with Journey Home and She's the One, both of which presented situations that were very satisfying emotional journeys. There's a certain economy to these stories that keep them quite separate from a novel or something that could become a novel. But in that economy, more has to be told, and the intensity of this telling gives these stories a fullness of life that is dense and moving. Most of these stories have portents of disaster that never seem to come to fruition. The author very cleverly plants an idea in her reader's head, then allows her characters to side step whatever terrible thing we might imagine for them, and it is this quality that makes them so real and like so many of us ordinary people who try to beat back a bad idea before it runs us off the rails. It is this control of the potential for drama that brings these stories to life, that makes them ring true.

[Sonya · Rating 4 out of 5]

Most of these stories are set in contemporary Britain, about people with normal lives. What separates them from the mundane is Tessa Hadley's ability to full animate the setting and the interior lives of her characters. She knows how to eke out details that are necessary to the whole, and to the story's overall effect and tone.

My favorite is "In the Country," where Julie is Ed's wife. They gather with Ed's family at the country house to celebrate Ed's mother's sixtieth birthday. Julie has a sort of love for the family, but always feels like an outsider, and she consciously holds back things about herself from them to maintain a level of reserve. It's not clear if this is for self-protection or to maintain a sense of self that she feels she might lose if she were to reveal it.

Without giving too much away, Julie shares a secret about her past with someone, and she does it not with just words that describe her memories, but with a sort of pantomime. She shows the character the way she dressed by putting cloth on her head, shows him the way she held her hands while she was praying, and then reveals more. There is a pulse in the story, summed up by the line, "The understanding came to her that these alternating moods were two pulses in life, opposite and yet related, like the expansion and contraction of a heartbeat: one diffusing sensation and sending it flying apart, this one gathering it in the living centre."

[Morgan Schulman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like most books of literally short stories, some are amazing and some are just tedious. If you've already read all the good ones in the New Yorker, don't bother; if not, get it from
The library and read selectively. The three star rating is an average because there are a few five star stories in here.

[RH Walters · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading these stories makes me feel like I'm crouching over a dollhouse and everything Hadley does with the people fascinates me.

[LAPL Reads · Rating 4 out of 5]

In Married Love and Other Stories, Tessa Hadley digs deep into the unconscious of family life. Her dense prose offers a tour into the emotional contours of sibling relationships, parenthood, and the kind of intergenerational melodrama to be found in weighty novels. She has a keen sense about the psychology of children and teenagers, who are brimming with awareness and curiosity about the world they inhabit, but are highly vulnerable to the hegemonic power of parenthood. Hadley understands how that power constricts and limits the freedom of young people to do things, and also how the power of parents inspires a need to escape the boundaries of family life. Here, escape is expressed in close or clingy friendships with someone in school or work, the desperation to marry someone much older, or fantasies about exploring unfamiliar emotional terrains, full of enchanting mysteries and surprises they might encounter along the way.

For Hadley, one’s formative years are more than sites of nostalgia, they’re also references about adulthood, and how someone evolves over time. A perfect example is “Pretending,” a story about two girls, and their friendship. One is Roxanne, and the other is the story’s nameless narrator. Looking back, the nameless narrator tells us she could’ve ended her oppressive friendship with Roxane back in childhood, but she didn’t; because she was swept up by Roxane’s energy, like a necessary addiction, especially her penchant for playing pretend games. Years later, she looks back on that friendship and learns something about her own character, “What I learned, playing with her, was that I was suggestible, unusually suggestible. Later in life it turned out that I was the perfect subject for hypnotism: the hypnotist only had to wave his hand pretty much once across in front of my eyes and I was gone.” As an adult, our nameless narrator struggles to survive the dullness of an insurance office, working like a peon, while Roxanne becomes an administrator, the Child Health Directorate, in a big hospital.

In the title story, “Married Love,” a college student marries an older man. Lottie is nineteen, but she can easily pass as thirteen or fourteen. She still lives at home with her parents and three siblings. Then, Lottie’s family is shocked when she announces her intention to marry Edgar Lennox, who’s forty years older, and worse, he’s also a professor in the college she goes to. But Lottie defends her decision to marry him, and tells her family, “I’ve met someone quite different from anyone I’ve ever known before, different from any of you. He’s a great man. He’s touched my life, and transformed it. I’m lucky he even noticed I exist.” Lottie’s justification of this marriage makes us wonder why she’s desperate to marry this man. Does she feel alienated from her family? Or was it mere infatuation for someone who knew how to charm the impressionable young adult with the right words? Edgar is seventy-two, after his third baby with Lottie. He never steps into the center of the plot, as though he’s merely a background character, not interesting enough to rival Lottie as the main protagonist of the story.

In many ways, the collection is populated by characters who feel they’ve deviated from the norm like Lottie, or marginalized by the in-crowd like Roxane, which is nothing new. In fact, we probably consume their stories everyday through Hollywood. Their lives are governed by an internal compass to act on emotions that might result in emotional desolation that’s oddly satisfying, like Julia in the story “In the Country.” Julia’s husband was raised in a big family. A vacation to the country with their children, to meet the in-laws, feels refreshing. One night, Julia takes a stroll alone for some air away from everyone, and meets the boyfriend of her sister-in-law, Seth. Now I won’t tell you what happened in that encounter. Find out, and grab the collection now. But here’s a clue from Hadley, “That evening all the ordinary things that she and Seth said to one another, all the times they brushed past each other or sat down together, were a code for something else enormously important that had happened, but did not appear.”

Reviewed by Michael C. Baradi, Librarian, West Valley Area

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hadley's writing is so entrancing; I loved every one of these short stories. She takes familiar themes (marriage, family, divorce, death, parenting) and illuminates them with wisdom and heart and verve. Like her novel The Past, which my book club read together, this collection is full of characters who fully engage the reader, sentences that you have to read and re-read just for the pleasure of their construction, and simple plots that are completely relatable because the events they depict are realistic and meaningful.

As an aside, one of the best passages is from the short story "She's the One"; this author understands readers and their passion for the written word. I've read few better descriptions of what a book can mean to a reader:

"Ally read novels wrapped up in her duvet beside the central-heating radiator in her bedroom, borrowing them from the centre and the public library, sometimes finishing one and starting another without even changing her position or getting up to make coffee, like an addict. She knew this wasn't the right kind of reading. Studying for her literature degree, she had learned how to analyze the words and the themes; she had worked dutifully on her essay style, imitating academic articles. She imagined the reading she did now as like climbing inside one of those deep old beds she'd seen in a museum, with a sliding door to close behind you: even as she was suffering with a book and could hardly bear it, felt as if her heart would crack with emotion or with outrage at injustice, the act of reading it enclosed and saved her. Sometimes when she moved back out of the book and into her own life, just for a moment she could see her circumstances with new interest and clarity, as if they were happening to someone else."

I'm not a regular reader of short stories, but these definitely made me want to read more of Hadley's impressive body of work. Highly recommended.

[Kasey Jueds · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, difficult for me to express how much I love Tessa Hadley's work. For me, she's pretty much the ideal fiction writer--her short stories, in particular (though I adore her novels too) are little worlds, full of what she calls "the deep-ocean trenches" of emotion, dread, sex. Those ocean-deep places occur again and again in these stories (especially in my favorites, "Journey Home," "In the Country," and "In the Cave"); coming to them is like rounding a corner and finding something both utterly familiar and utterly strange, startling and surprising and completely recognizable. She's a writer who teaches me better who I am.

[Diane S ☔ · Rating 3 out of 5]

These are very literary stories, and Hadley does a great job of noticing even the minutiae in the lives of her characters. She brings the readers attention to their surroundings and follows their lives longer than many short story writer do. Of course I had favorites and a few I could not relate to, but as a whole I enjoyed these stories of relationships good and bad. ARC from publisher

[Gloria · Rating 4 out of 5]

I am so glad I discovered Tessa Hadley. One of my new favorite authors. My only issue, as with Bad Dreams, was that some stories weren't quite... long enough. They seemed to end just a bit too soon, a little suddenly. But they were so good. Sooo good.

[Cathryn Conroy · Rating 5 out of 5]

From a 17-year-old girl who shocks her parents when she tells them she is marrying a man old enough to be her grandfather to a wealthy family gathering in the country for a birthday celebration during which a secret rendezvous takes place that will change all their lives, this book of a dozen short stories by British writer Tessa Hadley is a literary delight.

Some are emotionally searing, others are quietly insightful, and still others are charmingly quirky. All are brilliant observations on human nature, especially family life, among rich and poor, young and old, men and women. Almost all of them take place in the United Kingdom between the 1950s and the 2000s, although one is set in 1920.

Another thing they have in common is sex. A line in the story "She's the One" sums it up for the entire collection: "There was like a hum of sex in the air all the time."

But here is something some readers may not appreciate: Virtually all the stories end in such a way that forces the reader to imagine what happens next. The endings are rarely clear cut and final. As in, when you turn the page, you'll expect it to continue—but it doesn't.

Some of my favorites in addition to the two mentioned in the first sentence of this review:
• "The Trojan Prince": A 17-year-old boy who is struggling to figure out his life after school, tries to woo a wealthy a cousin, but things don't turn out the way he planned.

• "A Mouthful of Cut Glass": Neil and Sheila are college sweethearts, who come from very different backgrounds. Now it's time to meet each other's parents, and when they make the overnight visits, their relationship changes.

• "She's the One:" Ally is 22. Her younger brother died by suicide, and the family is an emotional wreck. Thinking she should stay at home now, she gets a job as an administrative assistant at a creative writing center. There she meets Hilda, a woman who is older than her mother, but the two strike up an unlikely friendship. And then Hilda tells her a disturbing story about her childhood.

• "Post Production": Borrowing a bit from "Hamlet" (by Tessa Hadley's own admission), this is the story of two brothers. Albert is a brilliant and revered film director. His younger brother Ben is his assistant. Albert dies. His widow, Lynne, and stepson, Tom, are devastated, relying on Ben for emotional support. But Tom becomes jealous of Ben, especially when he sees Ben has designs on his mother.

Smart observations, sophisticated plots, and lyrical prose combine to make this a remarkable collection of short stories.

[A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hadley does a beautiful job of capturing the everyday aspects of people's lives. The quotidian becomes dramatic in her hands. I appreciate how deftly her stories are plotted and how succinctly her characters are drawn.

Perhaps the simplest story in the book is Journey Home and yet it reveals all of Hadley's strengths. Alec, an art historian, is headed home from Venice. When the story begins he is mildly concerned about his sister because she changed her relationship status on facebook. As he takes one last look at his favorite works of art before heading out of the city, his concerns gradually intensifies. The reader picks up a few more salient details included that she tried to commit suicide seven years earlier. When Alec is stuck in the Paris airport and his sister still hasn't responded to his calls or texts he really begins to fret. The tension builds beautifully as Hadley slowly unwinds the story and gives out nuggets of the siblings' history. I won't give away the ending, but she absolutely nails it.

I loved the stories Married Love, A Mouthful of Cut Glass, and She's the One. There's not a failure in this book but a few not radiate as strongly as the others.

[Candice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked this, although not as much as the novel Clever Girl that i just finished. Nothing negative about the short stories, but I think the development of the characters in the novel was more satisfying, so I have another one of her novels to read next. I can see some of the seeds of her Clever Girl characters in these stories, however.

[Bettie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Starts 5.11.2012

Nicely written.

[Maartje · Rating 1 out of 5]

No stories here. Just random fragments of uninteresting characters' lives. Not a shred of dramatic development. Boring, flat and tedious.

[Renée Roehl · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars but read it anyway.

I really like the work of Tessa Hadley, a lot! I find it amazing how she can reveal years in three paragraphs and her transitions are masterful. Beautiful language woven throughout full characters.

This collection just didn't do it for me in the way of other books of hers have.

[Kerry Edwards · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5⭐️

As with all short stories, there were some I connected with more than others. The first story and book name ‘Married Love’ was especially emotive and stuck with me. Tessa Hadley has a way of making characters feel full and rounded in such a short time. I enjoyed ‘The Godchildren’, ‘In the Country’ and the one about the man going to sea but I can’t remember its name.

[Mrs]

Snippets of relationships, love, not just married love. How can she come up with so many ideas, so many people, so many details just to write a fragment? I guess that is the nature of short stories but these characters were so well drawn.

[Jakob Green Werkmäster · Rating 4 out of 5]

Inte läst klart än men så jag inte glömmer bort. Gillade novellen "journey home".

[Wendy Greenberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

I so enjoy each collection of Hadley's stories. Each vignette gives fleshed out characters, the smell of a plot and then just drops off, leaving the reader to do the work. What could be more addictive?

[Trisha · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Short and Sweet of It
Because I am incapable of summarizing a short story collection: "Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today’s most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents’ party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. In this stunning collection, Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect."

A Bit of a Ramble
I was struck by the quiet reserve of most of these stories. These are tiny portraits of relationships, most of which are not perfect, some of which are perfectly ambivalent, a state of being rather than a value judgment on that state of being.

As with many short stories I have read, plots seem unfinished, characters not quite fully developed; in this instance, however, this feels intentional and effective. Readers are given snapshots of everyday life, or sketches of people, that may not give the whole picture but do offer just enough for a truth to appear. These tiny moments in the characters' lives are a microcosm through which readers can derive a more universal reflection (and possibly an evaluation) of reality.

Many people, when reviewing a short story collection, discuss individual stories, their favorites or the ones they feel are most representative; however, I cannot do that this time around. I started scribbling down some notes about individual stories but found that I wanted to say so much about each one that this would be the longest review ever.

It is enough to say that I honestly believe you should read this one for its simple beauty.

[Ali M · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tessa Hadley’s work has been touted as “domestic fiction” and I find the description most apt and also very appealing. Big flashy stories with murder, adultery, or intrigue are rather easy when it comes down to it. But drawing your reader into the everyday is a much taller order. I find this type of fiction much more interesting though. It’s akin to looking in people’s windows at night when they have their lights on. What are they doing? How do they arrange their furniture? Are they together or is everyone in separate rooms? Hadley not only lets us indulge the not-so-secret voyeur inside, but she delves into the inner emotions of ordinary life, the passing intensity of feelings felt at certain points in your life, the joy, boredom and frustration of the quotidian. Sometimes her simple act of observing life as it passes is enough to make her reader reflect.

I liked all of the stories in this collection, but I think the deep and abiding disappointment that Hadley shares in her first story “Married Love,” was so emblematic of life and it has stayed with me the longest. Life never turns out how you expect, sometimes it is better than you ever hoped for, but so often, for so many people it is not at all what was planned. There is a little of this in all of the stories I think. The boy you fall in love with seems quite different when you go home to meet his parents. A brother commits suicide and it alters the trajectory of your life. The view of yourself that you set in childhood is shattered when you meet childhood friends as an adult. Sometimes there is the simple fact of waiting for the disappointment and how that shapes your life. All of the stories are really, really good and I am looking forward to reading more of Hadley’s work.

[Honor · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am very much grading on a curve here - this woman can write. She is a superb “craftswoman” - I would absolutely love to learn from her and of course, reading this book was quite instructional. However, as a collection of stories themselves, with drama, characters etc. they all kind of blurred into each other. The stylish middle aged women wore little makeup and had red hair, the men were a useless, and with one or two exceptions the plots were extremely low stakes. Her talent is very much in setting and in detail - finely wrought and specific. Again, instructive, interesting, admirable, but the writing just didn’t grab me by the throat. If you like to write fiction, though, it’s definitely worth reading.

[Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very good on objects - class/cultural significance, as emotional handles, as readable or unreadable to others, as simply wantable. Class disconnections, as noted in numerous reviews. Powerful entanglement of families plus powerful small gaps. Key line perhaps "you should always keep something of yourself back from them. Keep a few secrets. ... Just in case they accept everything about you." Danger of being swallowed up by ultra bourgeois "they" - the particular family in view here - but also by relationships, others, non-self. Uneasiness (but not hostility) at emotional contiguity with others reshaping identity.

[Michelle · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love a strong short story collection - it's one of my favorite genres. This one didn't do it for me, though the writing is strong. As I've written in oh-so-many reviews lately, my work situation right now is quite hideous so it is possible I am unable to "get into" any story as my mind is too busy stressing out about other things. I think I need something highly plotty because the last few I've read have me feeling antsy and distracted. As I look back the ones I've rated not strongly are all low on plot. So likely a problem of the reader, not the writer.

[Noel Cisneros]

Estas narraciones captan los conflictos del amor y del compromiso, cómo la rutina puede ser el aceite que mantiene lubricada la maquinaria de una relación o el agente corrosivo que termina por romperla. Jóvenes que se deciden casar con sus profesores cuarenta años mayores que ellas, una escritora que la revela a su nueva amiaga el abuso que sufrió de manos de su padrastro en la niñez, un joven que no puede hablar de lo que vio en la guerra y sólo puede describir la ropa de la gente que vio en ese país extraño al que lo mandaron son algunos de los cuentos que conforman esta colección.

[Penny · Rating 2 out of 5]

This has reaffirmed that I really am not sure about short stories - I am still deceived by the shortness and fail to see the significance of the succinct phrases and use of words, I am left wanting to know what happens next. This was an interesting dip into various senarios of married love, interesting but still making me feel as though I was skipping through them blindly.

[Susan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written stories, quite British and contemporary, but somehow the ending never seems to make a point rather than just fading off ... I had liked her novel The London Train, so this was a bit of a disappointment, although I did read every story and they were engaging.