{"id":10236,"date":"2024-04-05T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-04-05T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10236"},"modified":"2024-04-04T21:59:10","modified_gmt":"2024-04-05T01:59:10","slug":"this-is-the-story-of-a-happy-marriage","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/04\/05\/this-is-the-story-of-a-happy-marriage\/","title":{"rendered":"This is the Story of a Happy Marriage."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019m about as big a fan of Ann Patchett as you\u2019ll find \u2013 I\u2019ve read every one of her novels, including the Pulitzer Prize contender Tom Lake<\/a><\/em>, made a pilgrimage to her bookstore Parnassus Books before the pandemic, and was even scheduled to do a talk and signing there in May 2020 that obviously never happened. Somehow in all my fandom, I\u2019d never read any of her nonfiction, even though that\u2019s where she got her start; I just loved her fiction so much that I couldn\u2019t imagine reading her voice in a different milieu.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My wife recently got me a copy of Patchett\u2019s 2013 essay collection This is the Story of a Happy Marriage<\/a><\/em>, and, yeah, of course it\u2019s great, because Patchett could write about a ham sandwich and make it interesting. It\u2019s her first essay collection and includes works published from 1996 through 2012, including her essay \u201cThe Getaway Car,\u201d which was also published as a separate book. That essay alone was worth the time spent reading the whole book, as it\u2019s one of the best pieces I\u2019ve ever read on writing as a craft and a career, although the book has many, many other highlights across a range of subjects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most frequent topics is her marriages \u2013 the current one, yes, which in her telling is a happy marriage, but also her first, brief marriage, which ended barely a year in and which turned her off the institution for some time. She married young and unwisely (I can relate), but to her credit, realized it early and got out, a history she describes in \u201cThe Sacrament of Divorce,\u201d which makes what was probably a painful period in her life wryly funny. Karl, her current husband of many years (and partner of 11 years prior to that), comes up often in the book, both directly as in the title essay and \u201cThe Paris Match\u201d (the story of a fight), but also in the two stories about their dog Rose, \u201cThis Dog\u2019s Life\u201d and \u201cDog Without End,\u201d the latter about Rose\u2019s death. Karl certainly comes off far better than husband #1, at the very least. Also, the stories of women throwing themselves at him after his own divorce are hilarious, as if they came from a bad made-for-Netflix film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n <\/script> \n \n\n\n\n

\u201cThe Wall,\u201d one of the longest essays in the collection, tells of her abortive plan to go through the Los Angeles Police Academy and write a book about it. Patchett\u2019s father was an LA cop for a long time, and derisive of the people who led the department during the aftermath of the assault on Rodney King and subsequent acquittal of the four cops who beat him. Patchett took and passed the test, but didn\u2019t go into the academy, in part for fear of taking up a spot that would have gone to someone who really wanted to become a police officer, but the essay itself also shows us quite a bit about her relationship with her father without her ever addressing the topic head on. It\u2019s a masterful piece of writing, with a bit of a humblebrag mixed in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Two essays deal with Truth & Beauty<\/em>, Patchett\u2019s memoir of her friendship with the late author Lucy Grealy, whom she met when they were both 21. Grealy had cancer of the jaw as a child and was left disfigured by surgery to remove part of her jawbone; her own memoir, Autobiography of a Face<\/em>, told of her life with the emotional and physical consequences of the cancer and surgery, and was met with wide critical acclaim. One of those essays here is about an attack on the book by religious zealots in\/around Clemson, South Carolina, when that university assigned the book to its incoming first-year class. An alum named Ken Wingate, who was a lawyer, a member of the state\u2019s Commission on Higher Education, and a Presbyterian Bible teacher, said the book was pornographic and launched a campaign to get the requirement removed. Ain\u2019t a damn thing changed, folks<\/a>: Orange County, Florida, banned two of her books, including her greatest novel Bel Canto<\/a><\/em>, from its schools.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s some filler in here, like her intro to the edition of Best American Short Stories<\/em> that she oversaw, and an essay from Gourmet<\/em> called \u201cDo Not Disturb\u201d about what amounted to a staycation in the Bel Air hotel in Los Angeles, but they\u2019re short and unobtrusive amongst the gems that litter the collection, not least of which is \u201cThe Getaway Car.\u201d If someone told me right now they wanted to be a writer of any stripe, I would tell them to go read this essay. I don\u2019t think it tells you how to write or how to be a better writer, nor does it try to dissuade the reader from writing (a cynical response I hear too often from journalists \u2013 our industry is a mess, but the world needs journalists, period). And, not to put words in Patchett\u2019s mouth, she doesn\u2019t seem to have that sort of concrete advice. She offers no dictums like \u201cwrite every day\u201d or \u201cwrite what you know\u201d or any of the other bromides that you hear from writers; if anything, she writes for the reason that I write \u2013 because she has to. She does describe a more arduous writing and editing process than I imagined for her, given how beautiful and lyrical her writing is; I just figured this was how she wrote, and how she speaks (which we get an example of in \u201cFact vs. Fiction,\u201d a convocation address she gave at Miami of Ohio). It\u2019s an essay about her life in writing, how she saw herself as a future writer, how her career unfolded, how she had to work at a lot of things unrelated to writing \u2013 including building her relationships in the writing world \u2013 to get to be a writer as a full-time profession. It\u2019s a marvelous piece of storytelling that, if you have a writing bone in your body, will make you want to grab a notebook and start. What more could you want from an essay about writing? This is the Story of a Happy Marriage<\/em> does indeed have that story in it, but more than that, it is the story of a brilliant writer over the first forty-odd years of her life, and it is beautifully told even in its disparate pieces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m about as big a fan of Ann Patchett as you\u2019ll find \u2013 I\u2019ve read every one of her novels, including the Pulitzer Prize contender Tom Lake, made a pilgrimage to her bookstore Parnassus Books before the pandemic, and was even scheduled to do a talk and signing there in May 2020 that obviously never […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[512,547,161,225,316],"class_list":["post-10236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ann-patchett","tag-essays","tag-highly-recommended","tag-non-fiction","tag-writing","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10236"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10237,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10236\/revisions\/10237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}