ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE: A Novel in Stories

In ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE Louise Farmer Smith pierces the myths children are told about why their parents chose each other. The stories involve a ruthless man who lifted a teenage girl lifted out of the hunger and chaos that followed the Civil War, the suicidal wife isolated on the Oklahoma prairie, the china painter whose husband could not make a living, and her daughter who dreamed of luxury. Dark? Yes, but funny too.

In a Note to The Reader Smith wrote:
What was your father thinking the night he proposed to you mother? Why did she say yes? By the time we ask all the compelling details have cooled into whatever myths they've chosen to tell us. Our grandparents' stories are even more frozen, and the truths of our great-grandparents' unions have perished in the airless memories of the dead.