I Married My Mother-In-Law
And Other Tales of In-laws We can't Live With--and Can't Live Without
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- $5.99
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- $5.99
Publisher Description
In-laws are the inescapable consequence of marriage. Whether they’re kindly or malevolent, helpful or crazy, they’re unavoidable. The relationship can be traumatic, rewarding, maddening, and hilarious—sometimes all at once.
In I Married My Mother-in-Law and Other Tales of In-Laws We Can’t Live With—and Can’t Live Without, Ilena Silverman brings together a collection of talented, successful writers who plumb their own experiences for extraordinary and unexpected wisdom about this prickly and often misunderstood relationship.
We hear from some of today’s best authors, including Michael Chabon, who writes movingly about the lessons he learned from his first father-in-law; Kathryn Harrison, whose relationship with her father-in-law was far more rewarding and less complicated than the one she had with her own father; Matt Bai, who struggled across cultural barriers to learn more about the lives of his reserved Japanese-American in-laws; Martha McPhee, who explores the difficulty in fully knowing her husband without ever having known his parents; Susan Straight, who recounts her experience as the first white woman to marry into her African-American husband’s extended family; and Ayelet Waldman, who ponders the competition between wives and their mothers-in-law for the attention of their husbands/sons.
By turns blunt and poignant, horrifying and touching, the essays reflect the rich complexities of these bewildering and life-changing relationships. Remarkable for both the quality of its prose and the scope of its emotional insight, I Married My Mother-in-Law is an unforgettable anthology about the struggles and rewards of life with our other families.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In spite of its funny title and occasional humor, this anthology of in-law stories is quite serious. For every gleeful in-law basher (e.g., Ayelet Waldman, acknowledging what a bad mother-in-law she intends to be; and Amy Bloom, cheerfully explaining why she hates her partner's parents), there's a strong representation of in-law lovers. There's Martha McPhee, who wishes hers hadn't died before she'd known them; Peter Richmond, who came to know his wife better by knowing her mother; and Barbara Jones, who realized her tyrannical father-in-law regretted his poor parenting and was actually a devoted grandfather. For many, having in-laws from another culture Jewish, Japanese, African-American is unexpectedly rewarding. In-laws often don't respect boundaries, but sometimes they're beloved precisely because they're emotional and overinvolved people can be attracted to the parents they never had. Indeed, some in-laws become dear in spite of the trouble they cause, as in Colin Harrison's luminous account of caring for wife Kathryn's grandmother. While there's a lot of death in this collection people seem to experience in-laws mostly in their passing there's wit, wisdom and great writing, too.
