What Are You
Reading?
What Are You Reading? A project sponsored by the Friends of the Macomb Public Library District to encourage reading and book discussion in our community. Would you like to share your favorite books with other readers? Please send your name, occupation or grade level, book author and title, and a brief statement about the book and why you liked it to Kate Joswick, [email protected].
Reviewer’s Name: Alice Davenport Reviewer’s Occupation: Clergy Book Title: This is the Story of a Happy Marriage Book’s Author: Ann Patchett
This Is the Story of A Happy Marriage,
by Ann Patchett, was published in 2014. I was delighted to discover it this year. This memoir elucidates the books of Patchett's that I have read - Bel Canto, The Dutch House, and Tom Lake; I have a few left to go! In these essays about her own life, she comes alive as a person, a writer, and a bookstore owner (Parnassus Books in Nashville). The book is about much more than her happy marriage - it is, in fact, also about the many unhappy marriages in her personal history: her parents' divorce as well as her first marriage, along with others, are chronicled. For her, those early experiences in her life paid off, as is often the case, in preparing her for her current, happy, marriage relationship. Along the way, she shares her relationship to writing, which began early in her life when she wrote for magazines such as Seventeen, Elle, Vogue, and G.Q. She did well with such work, and it also paved the way for her well-known novels. While some of her memories. such as losing her beloved dog, Rose, are tear-jerkers, she also writes with a wry sense of humor that brought laughter to this reader. Her memoir opens with these words: 'The tricky thing about being a writer, or about being any kind of artist, is that in addition to making art you also have to make a living.' She did not earn a living wage to begin with. She put in years, part-time, in the food service industry, and then teaching creative writing part time after earning an M.F.A. in Iowa. Of this she says: 'Days spent attending to the creativity of others often left me uninterested in any sort of creativity of my own.' That sounded familiar to me. Patchett says, later in the book, 'I was always going to be a writer. I've known this as long as I've known anything.' She didn't think it would make her rich (although it has), but she was sure it would bring her happiness. She goes on to say this: “Logic dictates that writing should be a natural act...we should be able to tap into the constant narrative flow that our minds provide - the roaring river of words filling up our heads, and direct it out into a neat stream of organized thought so that others can read it.'
I am grateful that she has been able to pour her words and thoughts into books for all to enjoy.
