This Book Snuck Up on Me and then Assaulted Me with Brokenness, Depravity, Laughter, and Grace
A Short Review and Some Favorite Quotes from "How to Stay Married" by Harrison Scott Key
*Disclaimer: The opinions I express in reviews are my own and are separate from my role as pastor in my local church. The views I express here do not in any way suggest an endorsement of these works, and certainly aren’t an endorsement of any writer’s totality of work. Also, I wish I didn’t have to say this, but I really do.
I am not sure which algorithmic entity drove How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told by Harrison Scott Key onto my reading list, but I started reading it on Friday, finished it on Saturday, and it totally ruined my weekend … and may just have upended the trajectory of my life, in an altogether positive direction. I read it quickly, in part because it is so brilliantly written making it very difficult to put down, and in part because it was haunting me to the extent that I just needed to be rid of it so that I could think of something else, anything else, other than Harrison and Lauren’s marriage, and how it did, or if it did, and didn’t reflect my own. My wife, Sue, was so relieved when I finished it, because she could see how it was torturing me, and I think she suspected that some secondary torture was coming her way due to my over-reflective and (too) deeply personal response to such things. Her supsicions were correct. To be fair, she has seen this happen with other books (and some movies and records) over the years, but only three works have brought this sort of visceral response out of me in the last decade.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
Faith, Hope, and Carnage by Nick Cave.
Angel in Realtime by Gang of Youths.
And now … this book about marriage, betrayal, selfishness, grace, humor, commitment, virtue, and deep … deep pain.
How to Stay Married chronicles the remarkable story of the marriage between writer Harrison Scott Key and his wife, Lauren. I don’t want to give it all away but it tells a story of unresolved trauma, repeated and prolonged infidelity, abandonment, loss, and some measure of restoration, and it does it in a way that I don’t think I have encountered before.
It is so raw. So unfiltered. So painful. So funny.
I don’t even know if I recommend it or not, and so far have shared it with friends with at least a dozen disclaimers where I remove myself from any sort of responsibility for their emotional wellbeing. I recommend it like I recommedn playing with Roman Candles. It is an experience, and it will change your life, but the change might be that it takes your arm off.
This book wrestled me to the ground, forcing me to stare at the worst of myself, and then asking me to reckon with the love of God, all in a way that was so lacking in religiosity (and even decency at points) that I really didn’t know how to look away.
It made me want to be a better husband. It made me want to be a more attentive dad. It deeply convicted me that I ought to be a more genuine and reliable friend, and a more robustly gracious pastor. It has already led to great conversations between my wife and I as we were reminded of the importance of saying hard things and keeping short accounts, and loving each other through disappointments and missed expectations, which are legion if you are married to me. It did all this by living out the thing that I continue to encourage congregations to do … to tell each other the truth about who they are, and then to meet each with grace … right there, in the mud and murk of our complex and frail selves.
Grace really is amazing, but it isn’t pretty. It is exhausting, and exasperating, and infuriating, and unfair, and unwise, and it is what we all need to show, and to receive.
As a warning, this book might be very disturbing for anyone who has experienced infidelity and betrayal. But … it may also just save their souls and restore their sanity. The language is crass and explicit at points and the processing unfiltered to an extent that definitely won’t be a good fit for everyone’s conscience. It also seems to tell the story of some deep trauma wounds and subsequent mental illness. I was so grateful that Lauren wrote the chapter that she did near the end of the book. It helped to humanize her, and filled me with empathy, rage, and mercy. All at the same time.
And I don’t even know these people.
The book isn’t perfect. It left me many concerns which go beyond the scope of this pitiable reduction. But … if you want something that will make you laugh out loud one minute and then make you sob the next, and will make you so angry that you will be summoning God’s justice, and then so grateful for grace that you will find yourself clinging to the cross … then hey, you might enjoy reading this.
But please, don’t say I didn’t warn you. It will not leave you uninvolved and unchanged.
Rating: 4.5/5.
My favorite quotes:
The prophets of this present age would have us believe marriage should exist solely for the benefit of the people in it, for their emotional, psychological, and carnal empowerment, as though matrimony is merely an extended couple’s spa experience featuring orgies and explosive self-actualizations that you can exit whensoever your heart desires. What if the prophets are wrong? Are we not freer than ever in human history, and sadder, and more anxious, more wretched? What if marriage, at its very best, exists to remake us into beautiful new creatures we scarcely recognize? What if, in some cosmically weird way, escaping a hard marriage is not how you change? What if staying married is? (296)
… a good person is a temporary and imaginary creature, as make-believe as unicorns and fire-breathing cows, because the best of us are often the worst, full of proud and viperous snakes, believing ourselves gods. The dragons did not just live in history and myth. They lived inside me. (p. 29)
Lauren had begun looking at me the way you look into a sack of fast food when the order’s wrong and you’re already two miles down the road. The polarity of our personalities, once so intoxicating, had grown merely toxic. (p. 62).
Nobody ever told me that every marriage comes to this cataract in the river many times over, that every marriage goes over the falls. The two of you go tumbling across the smooth mossy rocks of time, and down you go and some couples die and some don’t, but everybody goes toppling. (p. 65).
I’d heard thousands of sermons in my young life, maybe too many. I have always felt pity for people who did this for a living. You try writing and delivering a new TED talk or two every week for ten or twenty or thirty years, based on a book nobody reads, baring your inmost thoughts for a crowd of friendlies who’ve heard it all before and strangers who’d rather be washing a cat. (p. 77).
Maybe God was imaginary, but if ten years in higher education taught me anything, it’s that everything can be doubted, even your doubts. (p. 87).
Writer Anne Lamott once said that there are only two prayers: “Thank you, thank you, thank you” and “Help me, help me, help me.” (pp. 96-97).
Best friends remain best friends because you can take breaks, but a marriage is the sleepover that never ends. (p. 136).
We wed and quietly tormented each other with our unspoken pathologies: my proud independence and mulish aspirations of professional success and the need to be adored, her proud independence and mulish aspirations of domestic perfection and the need to be adored. I found a hundred thousand readers to adore me. She found a neighbor. (p. 268).
The reality is that every marriage is a partnership of two broken a**holes with good intentions and varying degrees of ability to deliver. (p. 269).
If you want to stay married, the first thing you’re going to need is to be insane. Because staying married is insane …Staying married is like being kicked repeatedly in the head by a mule who loves you, and the mule is God. (p. 289).
This is the joke and the surprise of marriage. You promise the impossible and then have the audacity to attempt it. (p. 291).
Whatever your feelings about Christ being the bridegroom and the church being the bride, here’s what I’ve come to see: Rome slaughtered Jesus, and that’s what marriage will do. It will slay you, crucify and burn and behead you and everything you thought you knew about yourself. And the thing that is left, after all is burned and plucked away, that is the real you. (p. 295).
One of my favorites, Alain de Botton, once wrote, “Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.” That is marriage, in the end: two of you, being you, warring against the worst parts of you, making space for the best to grow, and learning to see that some parts of your spouse are not your favorite, and letting those parts be anyway. Hating those parts is no grounds for divorce. The only thing worth divorcing, in most cases, is the hatred itself, and your inborn desire to shape the world to your will like some kind of Marvel villain. (p. 297).
Maybe you think me a fool for believing in a God that helped me stay married to a woman who gave me every good reason to let her go. Maybe I let bad things happen because for many years I had the emotional intelligence of a potted succulent. Maybe so. There are a lot of maybes in this book. Sometimes maybe is all you have to hold on to. That’s all faith is, an enthusiastic maybe. A passionate probably. A hopeful hopefully. (p. 299).
I read this book recently before I read your review, and your review was spot on. This book can be traumatic for people who have gone through this (I had been married to my best friend for 25 years before this scenario came crashing down in my life, unfortunately even though my husband was the one who cheated on me for years, he abandoned my daughter and I). There was a lot of pain reading this book, but Harrison Scott Key's wit soften the blow a bit so I could actually read the book. It was nice to see someone have the same feelings I did and in that way the book validated my feelings, which was a big breakthrough for me. Unfortunately, my husband's addiction had pierced his heart so deeply that it hardened it, and he was unable to see the value in our commitment and our marriage. All this being said, I do recommend this book, 1) validation for the hurting and a glimpse into how the cheating party justifies the behavior that can destroy a family 2) a reminder of the pitfalls of long-term marriages can lull you into complacency.
I listened to this book last year on audible, read by the author, and it was so powerful. I laughed so much and loved the rawness and hilarity of the authors’ story telling. You can’t help rooting for them! Have recommended to many others!