First Comes Marriage

October 15, 2018
Al-Marashi's debut memoir recounts her engagement and the early years of her marriage to Hadi, a fellow Iraqi American member of the Shia sect of Muslims. Before marriage, Al-Marashi believed that a traditional, family-sanctioned union to a boy from her same background would lay the foundation for a happy life. She also held the romantic, impractical, Americanized belief that rings and proposals and wedding-day highs laid the foundation for a loving marriage. Her lived experience, however, requires Al-Marashi to unlearn both of sets of beliefs. For years, she struggles to jettison her marriage angst. Hadi was accepted to exactly one medical school, forcing Al-Marashi to move to Mexico; suspend her own graduate work; and struggle to fill large blocks of empty, lonely time. Soon the pair has the resentment-laced Mexico fight with regularity. By exposing a long list of what she got wrong, including her beliefs about sex and the idea that her husband is an extension of herself rather than his own person, Al-Marashi finally gets to what's right.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)