Intimate Confessions from a Happy Marriage
April 17, 2023
Novelist Ellis (Bring Your Baggage) serves up irreverent essays about married life in all its less-than-glamorous glory. The author finds humor in the mundane, the semi-ridiculous (an extended email to a cat-sitter, full of painstaking detail for caring for an 16-year-old feline), and the sweet (on a not very successful attempt to cook moussaka, “the recipe equivalent of translating War and Peace,” for her husband: “We are married now because he ate that then”). Elsewhere, she rhapsodizes about Viagra and comments on the ways married sex has defied her expectations (“If someone told me... that the best sex I’d ever have would be in my fifties with my fiftysomething-year-old husband, I’d never have believed them”) and reminisces on her “last first kiss” with her husband, which the two recall differently (“This is how memory works in a happy marriage.... We are writing our own love story”). While one or two pieces feel incongruous, including a jokey, underbaked bit on housecleaning, Ellis’s writing is on balance assured, charming, and laced with an understated humor that nearly always hits its mark—as when she describes her injured, Percocet-medicated mother at her sister’s wedding, “mingling in broken English” with a man she thought she didn’t know but who turned out to be her cousin. This delights.