From This Day Forward

As the child of divorce, this book upsets me a little — marriage: not inherently awesome. Also the history of marriage that the authors assume is, uh, wrong. And holy unexamined privilege, Batman, on pretty much every axis I can think of.

But it's fluently written, the pseudo-case studies are interesting, and the glimpses into the negotiation of a 1960's inter-faith marriage are fascinating.

Worth reading, perhaps, certainly not worth re-reading.

Cokie and Steve's personal reminiscences are mostly uninteresting, but they shine compared to the historical interludes and interviews with divorced couples. The historical stories are blandly re-told from collections of letters without any added value. The interviews are oddly summarized with fairly judgmental commentary. The awkward integration of all these sections is made even worse by the style in the sections about Cokie and Steve, which are written in a kind of screenplay-slash-dialog.

I really wanted to put this book down about 20 pages into it, but I forced myself to continue. And, in all fairness, some of the bits about Steve's family were pretty compelling. Final score: it's pretty bad, but at least there's not much of it.