Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give

March 13, 2017
Inspired by her popular Modern Love essay published in the New York Times, Calhoun (St. Marks Is Dead) takes a humorous, realistic, and loving look at marriage in this collection of essays modeled after wedding toasts. Each essay mixes components of memoir and self-help, drawing on insight from Calhoun’s own marriage as well as the wise thoughts of clergymen and lessons learned from long-married couples. “The main problem with marriage may be that its not better than the rest of life,” she writes, explaining that “we think it will be different—purer, deeper, gentler—than other relationships.” Marriage isn’t just about the hearts and flowers stage, she opines, but also about occasionally lusting after others, buying houses, raising children, and everything in between. At various points in the book Calhoun is laugh-out-loud funny (as when she is compares a baby’s reaction to being baptized to the Onion’s classic op-ed about lobster entitled “Just Wait ’Til I Get These Fucking Rubber Bands Off”) and at other times painful (she describes coping with her husband’s affair) but always direct and honest. In the final essay, Calhoun offers the one wedding toast she would actually give: “Weddings remind us why we were put on earth... nothing more nor less than these moments will keep you—will keep us—together, all the days of our lives.” This realistic, empathetic book of advice is worthy of a spot on any newlyweds’ bookshelf.

February 15, 2017
True love never runs smooth according to these essays, which could pass as a memoir of the author's own marriage.Calhoun made her well-received debut with St. Marks Is Dead (2015), an impressive volume of journalistic research that blended the historical with the personal. This is a slighter work, though not the sort that rock critics would call a sophomore slump. Title aside, this will resonate most strongly not with those about to get married but with those who have been married awhile, even happily so, but who deal with the sort of struggles and tensions that all married couples do. After a fight with her husband, when Calhoun asked her mother the key to staying married, she received the reply: " 'You don't get divorced.' At the time, I thought her response flip, but now I consider it wise." A long-married woman told her, " 'the first twenty years are the hardest'....At the time I thought she was joking. She was not." Having yet to hit the 20-year mark in a marriage that appears stable, the author approaches her subject not as the voice of wisdom and experience but as someone in the same trenches who can comfort her married readers that they are not alone. She still feels (and occasionally submits to) strong attractions to the opposite gender, and she resents it when her husband does as well. When she writes of a book-tour encounter, "we'd made out, but not too much--unless you think that anything when you're married to someone else is too much, in which case this was definitely way too much," readers may wonder about Calhoun's maturity. But she's engaging and all-too-human, chronicling the strains of being together, being apart, sharing a rental car, screwing up finances, raising a son, and somehow staying together in spite of (and maybe because of) it all. Calhoun ends with a toast that she actually would give, and it's wise and lovely.

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February 15, 2017

Ushering in the arrival of the spring wedding season, two writers, both usually identified with other topics, offer their insights into what keeps the marriage machinery running. Novelist Piazza (The Knockoff) recounts the first year of her marriage to a man she knew for less than a year. With her parents' own rocky relationship as her only guide to married life, and the challenges the union faced early on owing to the revelation of a potentially devastating medical diagnosis, Piazza sets off on a worldwide odyssey in search of advice about how to be married. She seeks guidance from sources ranging from observant Jewish women in Israel to members of polygamous communities in Kenya with several stops in between (including tense discussions with chic French women). Her takeaways include timeless advice (keep talking to each other), along with updated adages (maybe it is okay to go to sleep angry, especially if you are tired). Piazza's insistence on maintaining her independence--even on the dance floor--despite having become a "wife," lends this account an uplifting tone.Calhoun's (St. Marks Is Dead) foray into the world of marital musing began with her oft-shared 2015 New York Times "Modern Love" column, "The Wedding Toast I'll Never Give," a pithy summation of the realities of marriage from the point of view of a veteran member of the institution. Calhoun, whose own marriage to a performance artist is in its second decade, expands upon her original piece in this series of graceful essays that explore the significance of marriage in a time that no longer deems marriage a necessity. Alternating between hilarious personal anecdote and sobering professional insight, this memoir conveys perhaps the simplest lesson ever given about learning to make a marriage last: just don't get divorced. Her other great contribution to the literature on marital happiness might be her explanation of why fights in cars are the worst: you cannot storm off. VERDICT Piazza and Calhoun approach the conundrum of connubial happiness from differing (albeit white, heterosexual) vantage points, but with the same endpoint of golden anniversaries in mind.--Therese Purcell Nielsen, Huntington P.L., NY

Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2017
Because telling newlyweds to just be nice to one another, stay stubborn enough to never get divorced, and remember that soul mates are made, not born, doesn't seem exactly congratulatory, Calhoun (St. Marks Is Dead, 2015) says she'll keep the toasts gathered here to herself. (But thank goodness she didn't, really.) Married for more than a decade, Calhoun plumbs personal material for her explorations into how to guide others through a wedding's great beyond while drawing on extensive research and interviews with scholars, clergy, and acquaintances at different stages of marriage. She hits all the universal, scary-to-ponder topicsboredom, temptation, isolationand readers will marvel at the connections she makes through her many-limbed approach. Calhoun's synthesis ultimately affirms that, as both a catalyst for an endless stream of imagined paths not taken and a determined, deliberate act of love, marriage is many thingsbut it's not mundane. This despite-appearances celebratory book is moving, refreshing, funny, and not incidentally coming out in time for wedding season. Place it prominently.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)