On an ordinary day, a book called How to Stay Married would have never broached my radar, given the dismal marriage prospects of eccentric librarians, but as it happened one of my favorite authors mentioned Harrison Scott Key last week and commented that this was a shift from Key’s usual “funny” books: it was, instead, his attempt to live and grow through the horror and sorrow of marital infidelity. The cowritten memoir –for the wandering wife has her own chapter — is a compelling mixture of humor and gut-wrenching despair, with little threads of commentary about other things like church woven in, as well as deeper insights about human nature that could be lifted from Solzhenitsyn. That’s part of the reason a bachelor like myself can read and be moved by this book, so much so that I imagine it will be on the year’s top ten list.

How to Stay Married doesn’t follow a simple construction, though it’s cohesive and very effective in how events are presented: believe me when I say that his not writing about their wedding until the last quarter of the book makes perfect sense once a reader is deep in the story. This is not a book that presents Key as a martyr: indeed, as he and Lauren begin their initial approach at restoring their union, he takes a hard look at himself and confesses the way he suspects he has failed as a person and as a husband. I mentioned when reading The World’s Largest Man that there were already premonitions of their faltering union, and Key delves into the mutual exercise in papering-over tension that he and his wife both engaged in for years. In brief, her background gave her a lot of emotional baggage going in, and he was too consumed by his work and too quick to revert to jokes to realize the growing sickness in their marriage. When the mask finally dropped, he reeled with which instincts to follow — fight, flight, or freeze, and found support in an intimate group of friends who helped him discern what was best for all parties, particularly their three girls. The struggle for reconciliation is not a simple one: both make it clear they were wandering in the darkness of their own souls and occasionally being beaten up by monsters along the way, but through stubbornness and grace — they found a place to grow again.

Being an outsider to Wendell Berry’s country of marriage, there’s a lot in this I can only appreciate at a theoretical level. Key’s painful memoir — he began writing the day she told him, as writing is the way he processes both the world within him and without him — drives home what a radical institution marriage is in the present world. Not for nothing does traditional Christian theology regard marriage as the proto-church, for it involves a total dying to self, and we witness and experience that death throughout this. Not that it’s a book clouded in darkness: it’s often hilarious, sometimes in a gallows humor kind of way. That combination of joy and sorrow, of despair and hope, is constant here, the two legs striding along and carrying the reader along. Even without being married there is enormous merit in Harrison’s observations as he tries to find his way, supported by his friends and his and his wife’s family: he recognizes Solzhenitsyn’s truth about the line between good and evil running between every human heart, for instance, and recognizes too the importance of communal connection, the perils of self-idolization which both he and his wife pursued, finding themselves in a self-made hell. Both Harrison and Lauren’s best and worst selves slug it out throughout this work, and it was heartening to see people volunteering themselves to go through pain because they knew it would spare their daughters, or because their still-obdurate love for the other kept them pushing forward despite the temptation of easy escape, the open doors shining with light but leading to nothingness.

This is one of those books I’m going to remember, and will plan on visiting Key’s other works.

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