Elizabeth Weil's Blog - Posts Tagged "love"
Claire Dederer, author of Poser, reviews NO CHEATING, NO DYING
You know what no man ever wants to do? Talk about his marriage. How it’s going, how he feels about it, and, by the way, what is love anyway? All the stuff, to generalize grossly, that women love talking about. The highest compliment I can give Elizabeth Weil is to report that when I finished reading her book, my husband picked it up, read it in a single sitting, and thereupon wanted to discuss our marriage for about three hours.
His eagerness was a testament to the charm, intelligence, warmth, and courage of Weil’s book, which (I fondly hope) will spur conversations in households everywhere about the meaning of marriage, one of our strangest institutions.
Marriage is a legal bond, a love affair, a trap, a safety net, a financial partnership. Its denizens know that it eludes definition and becomes more complex with every passing year. To try to pin it down, then, is an act of sheer audacity, a quality Weil appears to have in abundance. At the opening of No Cheating, No Dying, she decides to take a long cold look at her own marriage and do what she can to make it better. Her husband, Dan, goes along for the ride, if a bit reluctantly. The two of them cast a wide net in the strange marriage-improvement industry that few of us will ever encounter unless we are in a particular kind of trouble. They visit counselors and therapists, rabbis and priests. They talk about money and mothers and children and remodels. And, occasionally, about love.
Weil has an eye for detail, a knack for propulsive storytelling, and a lively sense of humor about her own situation. All of this would be enough to make No Cheating, No Dying a fun and compulsive read. What elevates the book is Weil’s honesty--especially her candor about the very ordinariness of her life and her marriage. She doesn’t pretend that her marriage is exceptionally bad or exceptionally good; that kind of overstatement would’ve made for a very different and, paradoxically, less interesting book. She simply gets down the truth. She doesn’t trump up her plot or exaggerate the conflicts between her and her husband. She doesn’t pretend that any of the stuff going on in her house is a) the end of the world or b) the greatest thing that ever happened. Instead, she does something much more difficult: She trusts her material. And in trusting the humble stuff of her life, she draws us in and makes us care about her and the people around her. This is a neat trick, and one that is, believe me, much much harder than it looks.
Weil is an explorer. She ventures into what are undeniably the most private precincts of modern life and tells the rest of us what she finds there. Her courage and her humor are so irresistible that even my husband followed her--and for that she has my eternal gratitude.
-- Claire Dederer
His eagerness was a testament to the charm, intelligence, warmth, and courage of Weil’s book, which (I fondly hope) will spur conversations in households everywhere about the meaning of marriage, one of our strangest institutions.
Marriage is a legal bond, a love affair, a trap, a safety net, a financial partnership. Its denizens know that it eludes definition and becomes more complex with every passing year. To try to pin it down, then, is an act of sheer audacity, a quality Weil appears to have in abundance. At the opening of No Cheating, No Dying, she decides to take a long cold look at her own marriage and do what she can to make it better. Her husband, Dan, goes along for the ride, if a bit reluctantly. The two of them cast a wide net in the strange marriage-improvement industry that few of us will ever encounter unless we are in a particular kind of trouble. They visit counselors and therapists, rabbis and priests. They talk about money and mothers and children and remodels. And, occasionally, about love.
Weil has an eye for detail, a knack for propulsive storytelling, and a lively sense of humor about her own situation. All of this would be enough to make No Cheating, No Dying a fun and compulsive read. What elevates the book is Weil’s honesty--especially her candor about the very ordinariness of her life and her marriage. She doesn’t pretend that her marriage is exceptionally bad or exceptionally good; that kind of overstatement would’ve made for a very different and, paradoxically, less interesting book. She simply gets down the truth. She doesn’t trump up her plot or exaggerate the conflicts between her and her husband. She doesn’t pretend that any of the stuff going on in her house is a) the end of the world or b) the greatest thing that ever happened. Instead, she does something much more difficult: She trusts her material. And in trusting the humble stuff of her life, she draws us in and makes us care about her and the people around her. This is a neat trick, and one that is, believe me, much much harder than it looks.
Weil is an explorer. She ventures into what are undeniably the most private precincts of modern life and tells the rest of us what she finds there. Her courage and her humor are so irresistible that even my husband followed her--and for that she has my eternal gratitude.
-- Claire Dederer