This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

I loved every essay in this book. Reading Ann Patchett is inspiring not as much for her topics, although they are riveting, but for her writing. I feel like I just dive into a pool of words that are put together in exactly the right way. How does she do that? I aspire to be a Patchett completist someday.

Comments on just a couple of the essays
The homage to her father, a retired LA cop, was touching and authentic. I was moved by the extreme effort she put into trying to understand his world.

I am not educated in opera, but to hear her describe the discovery of opera and her resulting passion for it tugged at my heart. How wonderful to make a such a discovery that carries you through life.

This book was a pure pleasure to read. Ann Patchett calls herself a novelust, a fiction writer, but this book contains some of the best, most polished NON-fiction that I've read in many years. There are close to two dozen pieces here, all complete in themselves, but together they make a lovely memoir, by a woman who decided as a child that she would be a writer. Patchett is one of those rare writers who knows how to laugh at herself, who refuses to take herself too seriously. So she is extremely likeable, an important element in a memoirist. Strangely, most of these essays were freelance pieces done over the course of several years, yet they all hang together beautifully to give us a portrait of the writer as a child and a young woman. show more I especially loved the final piece, "The Mercies," about her friendship with Sister Nena, who was her reading and writing teacher in grades one through three at St Bernard's Catholic School in Nashville. We learn, to my surprise, that Ann was a slow learner, and only learned to read and write in the third grade, with extra help and prodding from Nena. (Patchett attended 12 years of Catholic school.) And "Dog without End," about her aged canine companion , Rose, broke my heart, of course. Especially after reading the earlier "This Dog's Life," about how she acquired Rose. And there is another heartbreaking essay about the last years of her beloved grandmother. More than one of the pieces give us glimpses of her husband, Karl (a doctor), and the long on-again off-again (eleven years) relationship they endured before marrying, both of them previously married. The title piece anchors the collection. And rightly so. I was struck by her line, "The love between humans is the thing that nails us to this earth." And, a bit later -

"We are, on this earth, so incredibly small, in the history of time, in the crowd of the world, we are practically invisible, not even a dot, and yet we have each other to hold onto."

Yes. I loved this book. I've never read any of her fiction, but I have Bel Canto on my shelf somewhere, so ... This one? Just the best. My highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER show less

These days, Ann Patchett is best known for her novels, but she began her writing career as a journalist, mastering the art of short non-fiction. This collection of essays, originally published in the New York Times, Atlantic Monthly, and other major media outlets, represents some of her finest work in the genre.

These essays are highly personal, and collectively describe a life with all of its ups and downs. Patchett discusses her writing career, her romantic and family relationships, her dog, the decision to open a bookstore, and her friendship with Lucy Grealy (covered in depth in Patchett's memoir, Truth and Beauty).

Many times, an essay took hold of me, prompting anything from nodding in agreement to outrage to tears. I couldn't show more possibly mention every one of these moments. One that stood out was her 2007 piece about her 2006 appearance at Clemson University. Truth and Beauty was assigned reading for the incoming freshman class, to the outrage of many parents and alumni who wrongly deemed it pornographic. Patchett endured their public shaming, and to its credit the university did not cancel their invitation for her to address the class. Her powerful address, "The Right to Read," follows her essay about these events. The final essay in this collection, "The Mercies," is about an aging nun and at first seemed out of place. But as I turned the final page, I realized it was a perfect way to end this book while leaving room for more books like this in the future. show less

44. This is the Story of a Happy Marriage by Ann Patchett (2013, 306 page Hardcover, Read July 22 – Aug 3)

I'm having a tough time reviewing this. I just can't seem to figure out whether I liked it disproportionately to it's quality, or how to express that with the right amount of imprecision. I loved the collection. The quality is at least good, if not great. I mean Patchett clearly has some skills in writing personal essays (the essays are all about her life). She excels at bringing the reader in and making us interested, not dragging the essays along, and leaving the reader moved, sometimes in only a few words.

As these are all personal essays, cumulatively they work as something like a biography. She covers childhood experiences show more with divorced parents in two states, half siblings, grad school, bad marriages, affairs with the like of David Foster Wallace, dogs, aging, relationships, writing, her odd experience with freedom of expression, and how she has accidentally become the voice of the independent book store. For all she has accomplished, it was her book store, Parnassus in Nashville, TN, that got her on front page of the New York Times and on the Colbert Report.

I found I liked pretty much every essay. They were originally supposed to stand on their own, and they do. The Getaway Car: A Practical Memoir about Writing and Life is a short manual on how to write, or at least how she writes. It's quite brilliant, I think. How to Read a Christmas Story is simply about her dad telling her a Christmas story over the phone on Christmas day. But it's not a simple story. Thanks to her parent's divorce, her father calls Tennessee on Christmas Day from California where he spends the day alone...and just little details like that make this actually a fairly complex story that does a lot to the reader in a few pages.

For me, clearly the best essay was the title one, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage. Maybe I like this so much because this is where she talks about her relationship with David Foster Wallace (who she merely names David). But also it's just a great fairy tale version of her life. There is naivety, a tragic beginning, a terrible sin, variations of romance, and various snares and adventures that all lead up to a happy ending of sorts. And it was not till afterward that I started to think about how many different elements of the story captured me, or about all those distracting details that were stripped off, to keep simple, if you like.

Anyway, for what it's worth, I got a lot out of this.

2014
https://www.librarything.com/topic/172769#4801109 show less

Ann Patchett glows off the page. I'd read (or in the case of the title story, listened to) several of these essays before, but I could easily read them every year and not tire of them. Patchett is the person you want as your wise aunt, your best friend, your neighbor - and definitely also your local bookseller and novelist. Lucky Nashville.

"The quality of a life is defined not by its length, but by its depth, its actions and achievements. It is defined by our ability to love." ("Fact vs. Fiction," 162)

"No matter what book clubs tell us, reading is a private act, private even from the person who wrote the book. Once the novel is out there, the author is beside the point." ("My Life in Sales," 168)

"But the twenty-eighth time...someone show more says, 'So tell me where the idea for this novel came from,' something in my brain starts to come loose. 'This book is about YOU,' I want to scream. 'I've been stealing your mail for years.'" (168) show less

{T}he story of my marriage, which is the great joy and astonishment of my life, is too much like a fairy tale -- the German kind, unsweetened by Disney. It is the story of children wandering alone through a dark forest, past shadowy animals with razor teeth and yellow eyes, towards an accident that is punishable by years and years of sleep. It is an unpleasant business, even if it ends in love. I am setting out to tell the story of a happy marriage, my marriage, which does not end in divorce, but every single thing about it starts there.

That’s from the title essay* in this collection of 23 short, medium and long personal essays, all previously published in prominent newspapers/ magazines/ books from 1996 to 2012.

Patchett writes on a show more variety of topics (nuns; opera; censorship; trying out RVs; trying out for the police academy) but keeps returning to a core: divorce; family; dogs; home (Tennessee); reading and writing. She also chronicles her co-founding of Parnassus Books, an independent bookstore in Nashville.

Her Bel Canto is on my all-time Top 10 Fiction list; I’ve liked others of her novels less, and have two still in my TBRs. While this collection felt like a bunch of unrelated essays early on, those core themes helped it to coalesce later. And not only is there not a clunker in the bunch, the essays are almost uniformly excellent -- wise and optimistic. A terrific comfort read.

*Note: This work# and this review relate to Patchett’s collection of essays. Reader, browse the tags, ratings and reviews here with caution -- many of them relate to a standalone audio recording of the single, title essay only.

(Review based on an advance reading copy provided by the publisher.) show less

This is a book of fine essays by one of the best writers around. I love Ann Patchett's fiction (Bel Canto, State of Wonder) but had not read any of her magazine articles until now. Truth and Beauty was also non-fic, the biography of Ann's dear friend Lucy Grealy, whose cancer of the jaw left her physically devastated but with a brilliant mind and soul. One of the essays here defends Truth and Beauty and Autobiography of a Face, Lucy's book, which were assigned freshman reading at a Southern college where parents of students attempted to censor the project. Ann's speech to the freshman class is her Gettysburg address of defense of literary freedom, though oddly enough, she repudiates the speech as pretentious later on.

Ann's deliciously show more complex marriage is the subject of the longest story and maybe the best. Everything here is grade A+++ choice. Don't miss it. show less