You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married)
Looking for Love in the Age of Divorce
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- £8.99
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Fast approaching the age when bachelors go from seeming curious to seeming weird, Oscar-nominated documentarian Dana Adam Shapiro set out across the country with a tape recorder in search of modern answers to an age-old question:
Why does love die—and what can we do to prevent it from happening?
It all began as a self-help journey in the purest sense. A serial monogamist for more than two decades, Shapiro had just ended his fifth three-year relationship and wanted to know why the honeymoon phase never lasted until the actual honeymoon. Believing that you learn more from failure than from success, he spent the next four years interviewing hundreds of divorced people, living vicariously through the romantic tragedies of others, hoping to become so fluent in the errors of Eros that he would be able to avoid them in his own love life.
The result is a timely treasure trove of marital wisdom—a provocative look inside the hearts, minds, beds, and e-mails of regular people who’d thought they found “The One” and lived to tell the tales of what went wrong. Shockingly intimate, universally relevant, and profoundly personal, this is a page-turning, voyeuristic peek into the private lives of our friends and neighbors that is as racy as it is revelatory. But ultimately, You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married) is a hopeful investigation of modern love and a practical guide for any couple looking to beat the roulette-level odds of actually staying together forever.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist, novelist (The Every Boy), and filmmaker Shapiro admits he's neither a husband or a therapist. But he crisscrossed America interviewing (sometimes for 20 minutes, sometimes for several days) hundreds of divorced men and women about their war stories of romance, compatibility, and compromise, infidelity, and the intimate, explicit details of their sex lives. After finding a couple of pairs of lacy panties that weren't hers, "Ann" snooped into her actor husband's computers, seeing his passionate e-mails to a younger woman and photos of them in bed, and when she confronted him, he eventually confessed to affairs with 40 women. "Paul," a psychologist who likes to dress as a woman and have sex with men, describes how he left his first wife so he could be free to be himself and told his current wife everything about his sexuality before getting married. While this book makes some perceptive points about relationships that will particularly resonate with readers going through the throes of a bad breakup, the interviews are often more confessional than insightful and veer from being frank and open to coarse and distasteful.
