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Twice Around a Marriage
"She's like the aging of a first edition of a modernist novel…"
In Twice Around a Marriage, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler delivers a tender and incisive portrait of a couple confronting the stories that bind them-and those that threaten to undo them-while locked down in Paris.
Twice Around a Marriage tells the story of Amanda Duval and Howard Blevins, an early-septuagenarian husband and wife who were once married for twenty-two years, then divorced for ten, and now are in the tenth year of a second-try marriage. They have come to Paris to see if they should attempt to remain together or call it quits. The day after they move into a tiny AirBNB apartment overlooking the park where they first met, Paris shuts down for Covid. The two of them are trapped indefinitely together in this small space, and so, since they are both literary types, they decide to emulate the Decameron and tell each other stories on alternating nights-stories of their lives together and apart-as they try to figure out their future even as a 21st century plague passes by.
In Twice Around a Marriage, Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler delivers a tender and incisive portrait of a couple confronting the stories that bind them-and those that threaten to undo them-while locked down in Paris.
Twice Around a Marriage tells the story of Amanda Duval and Howard Blevins, an early-septuagenarian husband and wife who were once married for twenty-two years, then divorced for ten, and now are in the tenth year of a second-try marriage. They have come to Paris to see if they should attempt to remain together or call it quits. The day after they move into a tiny AirBNB apartment overlooking the park where they first met, Paris shuts down for Covid. The two of them are trapped indefinitely together in this small space, and so, since they are both literary types, they decide to emulate the Decameron and tell each other stories on alternating nights-stories of their lives together and apart-as they try to figure out their future even as a 21st century plague passes by.
- GenresLiterary FictionFiction
252 pages, Hardcover
Published October 31, 2025
3 people are currently reading
34 people want to read
About the author
Robert Olen Butler
87 books455 followers“I’ll never stop believing it: Robert Olen Butler is the best living American writer, period.”
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
– Jeff Guinn, Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Robert Olen Butler has published sixteen novels—The Alleys of Eden, Sun Dogs, Countrymen of Bones, On Distant Ground, Wabash, The Deuce, They Whisper, The Deep Green Sea, Mr. Spaceman, Fair Warning, Hell, A Small Hotel, The Hot Country, The Star of Istanbul, The Empire of Night, Perfume River—and six volumes of short fiction—Tabloid Dreams, Had a Good Time, Severance, Intercourse, Weegee Stories, and A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, which won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Butler has published a volume of his lectures on the creative process, From Where You Dream, edited with an introduction by Janet Burroway.
In 2013 he became the seventeenth recipient of the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature. He also won the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. He has twice won a National Magazine Award in Fiction and has received two Pushcart Prizes. He has also received both a Guggenheim Fellowship in fiction and a National Endowment for the Arts grant. His stories have appeared widely in such publications as The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, GQ, Zoetrope, The Paris Review, Granta, The Hudson Review, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Sewanee Review. They have been chosen for inclusion in four annual editions of The Best American Short Stories, eight annual editions of New Stories from the South, several other major annual anthologies, and numerous college literature textbooks from such publishers as Simon & Schuster, Norton, Viking, Little Brown & Co., Houghton Mifflin, Oxford University Press, Prentice Hall, and Bedford/St.Martin and most recently in The New Granta Book of the American Short Story, edited by Richard Ford.
His works have been translated into twenty-one languages, including Vietnamese, Thai, Korean, Polish, Japanese, Serbian, Farsi, Czech, Estonian, Greek, and most recently Chinese. He was also a charter recipient of the Tu Do Chinh Kien Award given by the Vietnam Veterans of America for “outstanding contributions to American culture by a Vietnam veteran.” Over the past two decades he has lectured in universities, appeared at conferences, and met with writers groups in 17 countries as a literary envoy for the U. S. State Department.
He is a Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor holding the Michael Shaara Chair in Creative Writing at Florida State University. Under the auspices of the FSU website, in the fall of 2001, he did something no other writer has ever done, before or since: he revealed his writing process in full, in real time, in a webcast that observed him in seventeen two-hour sessions write a literary short story from its first inspiration to its final polished form. He also gave a running commentary on his artistic choices and spent a half-hour in each episode answering the emailed questions of his live viewers. The whole series, under the title “Inside Creative Writing” is a very popular on YouTube, with its first two-hour episode passing 125,000 in the spring of 2016.
For more than a decade he was hired to write feature-length screenplays for New Regency, Twentieth Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Disney, Universal Pictures, Baldwin Entertainment Group (for Robert Redford), and two teleplays for HBO. Typical of Hollywood, none of these movies ever made it to the screen.
Reflecting his early training as an actor, he has also recorded the audio books for four of his works—A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain, Hell, A Small Hotel and Perfume River. He was awarded an Honorary Doctorate degree from the State University of New York system. He lives in Florida, with his wife, the poet Kelly Lee Butler.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 24, 2025
The two married, divorced, now married but on shaky ground protagonists, Amanda and Howard, are intellectuals who excel at hiding their truth behind some pretty heady mind-games. Luckily, the wife/ex-wife Amanda comes up with a perfect way for them to survive: they’ll spend their days writing stories from their pasts, together and apart, and their evenings reading that story to the other. Amanda, the novelist, defines the terms: they will write honestly, from their senses and not from their minds, the place Howard, the literary critic, ie new to.
As anyone who’s been through a divorce can attest, the temptation to be cruel in the name of honesty is overwhelming. Their stories become ever more so until they both wield their mortal blows, describing long past infidelities in excruciating detail.
At the same time, the story narrates their internal dialogue, making their stabs worse for their regrets. They are two cool cats, too cool for affection. They shake off any tender impulses with their analyses of whether the action is true and even more, how it might be interpreted. So they don’t even have touch to soften their barbs.
Later in the book, the couple’s gay daughter and her fiancée show them a way out. There are scenes with them that are as tender as I’ve ever read, a balm for the seventy-year-olds. They teach the parents well, and in so doing, show us all how it’s done.
I can’t imagine why I would find all this heartache funny, but I laughed out loud throughout. One example I’ll never forget—when Amanda in one of her stories turns James Joyce’s exultation of love “yes…yes…yes” into “of course of course of course.” Equal parts clever and brutal, just like Howard and Amanda.
As anyone who’s been through a divorce can attest, the temptation to be cruel in the name of honesty is overwhelming. Their stories become ever more so until they both wield their mortal blows, describing long past infidelities in excruciating detail.
At the same time, the story narrates their internal dialogue, making their stabs worse for their regrets. They are two cool cats, too cool for affection. They shake off any tender impulses with their analyses of whether the action is true and even more, how it might be interpreted. So they don’t even have touch to soften their barbs.
Later in the book, the couple’s gay daughter and her fiancée show them a way out. There are scenes with them that are as tender as I’ve ever read, a balm for the seventy-year-olds. They teach the parents well, and in so doing, show us all how it’s done.
I can’t imagine why I would find all this heartache funny, but I laughed out loud throughout. One example I’ll never forget—when Amanda in one of her stories turns James Joyce’s exultation of love “yes…yes…yes” into “of course of course of course.” Equal parts clever and brutal, just like Howard and Amanda.
Displaying 1 of 1 review