A Writing Marriage
With Excerpts from Blue Antiquity
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A uniquely styled memoir that blends fiction and nonfiction to illuminate the love, faith, and artistry of two American writers.
In December 1998, novelist Oscar Hijuelos and writer/editor Lori Marie Carlson were married in the Riverside Church in New York City. One love story, one Pulitzer Prize, and one untimely death later, Lori is left to unveil the creativity and faith that were at the center of their marriage.
In a narrative of recollections inspired by the setting of a Lutheran cathedral library, Lori delves into the archaeology of their union. Her memories are coupled with excerpts from Oscar’s unpublished opus, Blue Antiquity, which he was writing at the time of his passing in 2013. Blue Antiquity is Oscar’s distillation of a lifetime of pondering human passion, familial love, personal identity, death, and eternity.
A Writing Marriage is a literary one-off in style and story that memorializes down-to-earth love and its endurance set against a background of bright lights and certain blessings.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this awkward blend of biography and self-portrait, A Stitch in the Air novelist Carlson-Hijuelos reflects on the life of her late husband, Pulitzer winner Oscar Hijuelos (1951–2013), their marriage, and how an unfinished novel discovered among Hijuelos's papers "would be among his crowning achievements" if he had completed it. The unpublished Blue Antiquity centers on Victor Mercado, an academic whose "cultural upbringing, hobbies, avocations, passions, and beliefs," Carlson-Hijuelos writes, "are virtually the same" as her husband's. Unfortunately, excerpts from the manuscript, which Carlson-Hijuelos includes "to harmonize with and expand upon select recollections of our relationship," are the strongest passages in the book. By contrast, her attempts to recount Hijuelos's life—particularly a lengthy childhood hospitalization that permanently impacted his ability to speak Spanish—can feel patronizing, with the author suggesting that her husband simply lacked "the confidence to assert himself in his family's native tongue." Trips to Europe and Japan, working vacations at the couple's waterside Connecticut home, and their joint hire at Duke University offer sweet glimpses into their relationship, but syrupy prose ("Ah, his childlike essence, so evident in his habit of arranging tableaus of his beloved lead figurines") mars the proceedings. Despite its good intentions, this disappoints.
