When I first saw the title of the book “How to Stay Married,” I thought it would be a how-to manual and rolled my eyes. I was sure that a book like that would be the last thing that I or any of my exes would be interested in. But no, this is a memoir, shot through with sharp humor. That’s better, though still I wondered: Do I really care about 300 pages on some stranger’s marriage? It turns out I did.
In this, Harrison Scott Key’s third book — his first, “The World’s Largest Man,” won the Thurber Prize for American Humor in 2016 — he explores the effects of an affair that his wife, Lauren, had with Chad, a neighbor whose “only real crime, at least up until the moment he did his best to destroy his family and mine, was that he was rather dull.” Because of the title, it is no secret that the marriage survived, but Key isn’t as interested in that as he is in the emotional ups and downs that he and his wife went through as each of them explored what was happening and came to agree on “the truth.”
There are a lot of ways Key couldn’t be more unlike me: He’s a man who lives in Savannah, Ga.; he was raised in a religious family; and he has been going back and forth about his own religious beliefs for years. There are moments in the memoir when he reminds you of one of those guys you know who corners you at a party and just cannot stop talking, mostly about himself. Key’s style is as far from spare or minimal as a style can be, but maybe that’s part of its allure. When a writer has a spare style, the reader feels as if they know what’s going on from beginning to end. With “How to Stay Married,” there is always something else to come, and as you read the book, you get more and more curious about what that might be (and what the next joke is). Memoirs are intended to be revealing, and Key doesn’t hesitate to reveal everything about himself, more or less as he learns it. He is not “contemplative” — he is more eager than that — and there is an energy to “How to Stay Married” that I haven’t previously experienced in a memoir.
To his credit, Key is aware that a memoir about family life risks exposing the spouse and the children in ways they wouldn’t appreciate, so he has to focus on his own thoughts and feelings. (Key says he has altered some names and details for privacy.) What he gains from his detailed analysis of his own response to his wife’s affair is self-knowledge. “This was not about Chad, I finally saw. He may have conspired with my wife to put my marriage out of its misery,” he writes, “but I, as much as Lauren, had starved and weakened and hobbled this marriage to the point where its death felt — for my wife, at least — the only option. Chad had been no knight-errant. He was, as I had been so long before, just another rebound, and now he’d vanished into the reeds as swiftly as a frightened snake. Our greatest enemy was us: we were the people who had killed our marriage, and we, with the help of beings both divine and mortal, would have to be the people to make it live again.”
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Some of the chapters are unexpected. The first of my two favorites is “The Truth Will Set You Free To Lose Your Mind,” a list of “facts” that Key discovers when he first talks to his wife about her affair. Fact No. 1 is: “Chad entered my home in secret and helped my wife with chores. ‘He would take out the trash,’ she said.” The second is about how, in despair, he decides to read the Bible, beginning to end. At one point he writes: “As I got deeper into the Old Testament, I saw grand metaphysical comedy everywhere, where the good guys go whoring and murdering and are chastened and humbled, where the high are brought so low so often that the book induces moral vertigo — and yet, those fools are loved by God anyway.”
And let’s not forget the chapter about the family dog, Gary, who inspires many paragraphs that dare the reader to disbelieve (“If it wasn’t nailed to the wall, he ate it, and if it was, he ate the wall”), as well as a few incidents that lead to Key’s being honest with his daughters, letting them know some things about what is going on between their parents and why their mother has left. Key does a great job of reproducing the chaos that the conflict brings into the lives of every member of the family.
Perhaps the most unexpected chapter is written by Lauren. It’s rare to hear both sides in a memoir about an affair. Lauren’s insights into her own feelings are both surprising and intriguing. Her parents divorced when she was a teen, and her mother died of cancer just before she married Key. The double loss haunted her relationship: “My loneliness made our marriage harder than it should have been. I couldn’t let Harrison see how much hurt was there.” She buried her pain in being a good wife and mother, then felt bitter, so she turned elsewhere for the affection she would not let her husband give her. “The affair uncorked a lifetime of feelings trapped inside, which felt so good, a relief, the way vomiting is a relief. But bad, the way vomiting is bad. Because now I had new feelings to trap inside.” Where Key shares the humor of their reconciliation, Lauren delivers straight-up candor: “I didn’t want to just make it work. I wanted to find love and peace in our marriage. I wasn’t going to just stay with him because it was the right thing. This had to be the real thing, too.”
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This is a hard act to follow, but Key bravely chimes in again: “Plenty will read this book and say, ‘Lo, this is why I choose to remain single.’” Key hopes you’ll walk away with another message, a trite but true one: that relationships are hard work, and that imagining your divorce is an important step in staying married. Also, maintaining a sense of humor.
Jane Smiley is the author of numerous books of fiction and nonfiction. Her most recent is “The Questions that Matter Most.”
How to Stay Married
The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told
By Harrison Scott Key
Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster. 320 pp. $27.99
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