Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give
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- $31.99
Publisher Description
Seven essays celebrating the beauty of the imperfect marriage.
We hear plenty about whether or not to get married, but much less about what it takes to stay married. Clichés around marriage—eternal bliss, domestic harmony, soul mates—leave out the real stuff. After marriage you may still want to sleep with other people. Sometimes your partner will bore the hell out of you. And when stuck paying for your spouse’s mistakes, you might miss being single.
In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, Ada Calhoun presents an unflinching but also loving portrait of her own marriage, opening a long-overdue conversation about the institution as it truly is: not the happy ending of a love story or a relic doomed by high divorce rates, but the beginning of a challenging new chapter of which “the first twenty years are the hardest.”
Calhoun’s funny, poignant personal essays explore the bedrooms of modern coupledom for a nuanced discussion of infidelity, existential anxiety, and the many other obstacles to staying together. Both realistic and openhearted, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give offers a refreshing new way to think about marriage as a brave, tough, creative decision to stay with another person for the rest of your life. “What a burden,” Calhoun calls marriage, “and what a gift.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Inspired by her popular Modern Love essay published in the New York Times, Calhoun (St. Marks Is Dead) takes a humorous, realistic, and loving look at marriage in this collection of essays modeled after wedding toasts. Each essay mixes components of memoir and self-help, drawing on insight from Calhoun's own marriage as well as the wise thoughts of clergymen and lessons learned from long-married couples. "The main problem with marriage may be that its not better than the rest of life," she writes, explaining that "we think it will be different purer, deeper, gentler than other relationships." Marriage isn't just about the hearts and flowers stage, she opines, but also about occasionally lusting after others, buying houses, raising children, and everything in between. At various points in the book Calhoun is laugh-out-loud funny (as when she is compares a baby's reaction to being baptized to the Onion's classic op-ed about lobster entitled "Just Wait 'Til I Get These Fucking Rubber Bands Off") and at other times painful (she describes coping with her husband's affair) but always direct and honest. In the final essay, Calhoun offers the one wedding toast she would actually give: "Weddings remind us why we were put on earth... nothing more nor less than these moments will keep you will keep us together, all the days of our lives." This realistic, empathetic book of advice is worthy of a spot on any newlyweds' bookshelf.
