Kirkus Review
One woman ponders what it means to be in love.When Catron's parents got divorced after three decades of marriage, the event caused her to take a closer look at her own faltering relationship, which had continued for almost 10 years. When she first got together with Kevin, life had stretched ahead of them with infinite possibilities, but after so much time as a couple, she wondered if she had settled for a life and a person that were not quite right for her. "It had never occurred to me," writes the author, "that you could love someone the way I loved Kevinthat you could want to wake up with him every morning and go to bed with him every nightbut not know if you wanted to commit the rest of your life to him." Their breakup was slow and fitful, but eventually they parted ways, leaving the door open for new relationships and questions about what it means to fall in or be in love. Catron uses her own romantic relationships and the marriages of her parents, grandparents, sister, and friends to question how and why we fall in love, what it means to share a life with someone without tying the knot, and how we use our relationships to show a certain side of ourselves to the world. Catron touches on a variety of disciplines, including history, psychology, literature, music, movies, and human biology, showing readers how love consists of numerous choices that influence us and help us overlook the small details about a person that become irksome. The author also includes her original essay on love, which was one of the most popular in 2015 in the New York Times, as well as 36 questions to ask a potential partner. Personal musings and reminiscences paired with solid research provide an interesting stroll through an abstract topic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
In 2015, Catron wrote an essay in the New York Times that became one of the paper's most popular of the year, about a psychologist's set of 36 questions purported to make strangers fall in love. The title of Catron's first book, a memoir in essays, is a bit misleading, since it's less about the questions and more about the author's experiences falling in and out of love. Catron spent 10 years trying to love a man who just wasn't right. Her picture-perfect parents decided to get divorced after many years of happy marriage. What was happening? What is the nature of love? How do we find love, and how do we keep it? Catron set out on a quest to find the answers to these universal questions. Along the way, she tries out the 36 questions, and yes, she does fall in love. Honest and well-researched, the book will teach readers plenty about love, science, and themselves. Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us.--Brock, Emily Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
For better and for worst: One new account offers lessons in love, while two others document its horrors. MARRIAGE TAKES WORK. We know, we know! But how do you tell the difference between the work required of any committed relationship and a life sentence of hard labor? A realist might say that if you're happy 51 percent of the time then you're ahead of the game, though anyone who's faced such a conundrum knows it's hard to apply a metric to domestic despair - or bliss, for that matter. This summer, two memoirs about marriages that take abrupt and chaos-inducing turns may instill a new appreciation for the placidity (or monotony) of your own partnership. A third book, which attempts to uncover the secrets of lasting intimacy, leaves readers with more questions than answers, but that's pretty much the idea. MY LOVELY WIFE IN THE PSYCH WARD: A Memoir (Harper Wave/HarperCollins, $25.99) began as a much talked about Modern Love column in The New York Times in 2011 and was expanded for Pacific Standard in 2015, where it became one of that magazine's most read articles of the year. Mark Lukach begins with a breezy and too-good-to-be-true summary of his early years with Giulia, a magnetic and ambitious Italian he met when both were freshmen at Georgetown University. Whereas Lukach is a laid-back surfer who teaches high school and coaches sports, Giulia is career-driven, corporate-minded and determined to micromanage her destiny. They seem like the perfect - and perfectly complementary - couple. And they are dizzyingly happy. But at 27, three years into the marriage and a few weeks into a new job, Giulia begins to experience severe anxiety that rapidly merges with suicidal depression. Within a month, she has entered into full-blown psychosis, insisting that she's talking to the Devil, who's sending her apocalyptic messages. Lukach and his father-in-law have no choice but to pick Giulia up and physically force her into the car to take her to the hospital. When she refuses to enter on her own, Lukach threatens to call the police. After six hours in the emergency room, Giulia is sent home with new medication, but a few days later she's back in the E.R. and this time admitted to a psychiatric unit in another part of the city. It will be the first of three such hospitalizations over five years, one of which comes shortly after the birth of the couple's son. At home, Lukach is Giulia's primary caregiver, one whose heroic rise to the occasion does not preclude moments of frustration and even rage. When the psychosis tapers off, depression takes its place and Lukach not only has to hide Giulia's medication so that she doesn't overdose in an attempt to kill herself but also inspect her mouth to make sure she's swallowed what she's supposed to. You can hardly blame her for resisting. The medication causes her to gain 60 pounds in two months and makes her sluggish almost to the point of immobility. When lithium is added to the mix in an effort to quell the depression, it leaves her, Lukach writes, "in the most stilted and zombified state yet, her arms frozen stiff at her sides, her fingers spread apart, her lips pursed, drool sometimes lingering at the corners of her mouth." This a harsh image for any memoirist to render, let alone a husband writing about his wife. But Lukach's rare combination of tenderness and ruthlessness is what makes this book more interesting than your typical illness narrative. His love for Giulia is apparent on every page, but he also hates her in moments and is willing to show us why. When depression finally lifts and Giulia is "better," she's so busy enjoying life again that she can't be bothered to do anything around the house, nor does she show much appreciation for everything Lukach did for her. You want to shake some gratitude into her, but you also want Lukach to stop coasting on martyr fumes. Fortunately, he's an honest enough writer to quote the therapist who invites a shift in thinking: "Sacrifice is a part of love, Mark. But might there not be more to love than just how much you sacrifice?" This kind of self-scrutiny is nowhere to be found in Jen Waite's husband, Marco, a handsome Argentine bartender who swept the author off her feet and was later discovered to be a liar and philanderer of towering proportions. In a BEAUTIFUL, TERRIBLE THING: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal (Plume, $25) Waite retraces her steps through a relationship that first gives her the "strange sensation of seeing the world in color for the first time" but eventually reveals itself to be a series of setups at the hands of a master manipulator. Organized into alternating chapters entitled "Before" and "After," the memoir is a study in "gaslighting" - making someone feel that she is crazy or only imagining things. Just three weeks after the birth of the couple's daughter, Waite stumbles on clues that Marco is involved with another woman. The evidence, much of it in the form of telltale emails, Facebook messages and GPS data, is too glaring to deny, though Marco denies it anyway with methods that range from suggesting his wife has postpartum paranoia to attempting suicide (or pretending to; it's not quite clear) amid an apparent psychotic breakdown. Along the way, Waite doubts herself - "maybe because he's so overtired and overworked he's making really bad decisions and doesn't realize how inappropriate his behavior is" - until she can no longer ignore the facts: She married a man who may well be a sociopath. Waite has a knack for showing the ways that cognitive dissonance can chart pathways in the mind that cause emotional confusion to obscure rational thought. But once we grasp the scope of Marco's deceptions, "A Beautiful, Terrible Thing" starts to sound in places like a friend who's been complaining about her bad relationship for years but does nothing about it. This is due mostly to excessive rehashing on the page, since once Waite makes up her mind to leave Marco she is nothing if not proactive in her efforts to make a life for herself and her daughter on their own. By the end, she has decided to pursue a degree to become a therapist specializing in women recovering from sociopathic relationships. Maybe that's why the book works best when Waite is sharing what she learns about destructive personality disorders and what makes certain people vulnerable to those that have them. After all, there's only so much you can hear about a 22-year-old's Instagram posts or the contents of a cheating spouse's email. As it happens, one of the emails that Waite finds from Marco to his girlfriend (she knows his password; talk about the illusion of trust) contains a link to an article called "36 Questions That Can Make Two Strangers Fall in Love." These questions, devised by a psychologist looking to see if a laboratory experiment could make two people fall in love, are in fact the basis of yet another Modern Love column that became a book. In HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ANYONE: A Memoir in Essays (Simon & Schuster, $26), Mandy Len Catron, who became a TED talk sensation on the heels of her Modern Love success, employs a combination of personal history, family history and social research to try to figure out what makes love last over time. That approach would seem to carry the promise of the kind of lofty self-help literature in the Alain de Botton vein. But despite Catron's obvious intelligence, she comes off as surprisingly unsophisticated. The myths she sets out to bust - the Cinderella story, the idea of happily ever after, the "tyranny of meeting cute" - are chestnuts long ago pulverized in the public consciousness, and it's unclear what new insights she's trying to bring to the table. The 36 Questions, on the other hand, are as intriguing as ever. Catron reprises her Modern Love essay here and includes all the questions in a separate chapter. They're a slow climb up a steep hill. "What would constitute a 'perfect day' for you?" gives way to "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?" It gets even scarier from there. The crystal ball question took me back to Lukach, whose book may be finished but whose uncertain life with Giulia continues. Would the couple have wanted to know their fate from the beginning? If they'd known, would they have married anyway? "With one word, I had lost my wife and gained a lifelong patient," Lukach writes of hearing the word "schizophrenia" applied to her for the first time. It sounds ominous, but aren't all life partners also lifelong patients in a sense? The work of a long-term committed relationship is essentially the work of keeping someone alive in the ways necessary to ensure that you're kept alive in return. That's a pretty heavy lift - and no two couples carry quite the same load - but it's still nice work if you can get it. And a small miracle if you can get it right even 50 percent of the time. MEGHAN DAUM'S latest book is "The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion." Her column appears every eight weeks.
