The Bare Necessities—Maddie Dawson (THE STUFF THAT NEVER HAPPENED)

2011 at 5am     Posted by Rebecca Schinsky

The Bare Necessities is a series in which authors and book industry professionals share annotated reading lists of books they love.

Maddie Dawson is the author of The Stuff That Never Happened, now out in paperback from Broadway Books. She’s here today with a selection of her favorite books about marriage, secrets, and self-deception.

I hate to admit it—it makes me sound so ghoulish—but I am fascinated by unhappy marriages. In fact, I’d have to say that I’m taken with the whole crazy notion of marriage in the first place. The very idea that two people can stand up together in their best clothes with all their friends and family watching and declare that they will not only live together for the rest of their lives, but also be each other’s best friend, soulmate, lover, co-parent, and financial partner, for pretty much forever, amazes me.

I mean, really—what could possibly go wrong?

And yet, despite the rumors circulating that this system doesn’t always produce the very happiest of circumstances, people do keep standing up for this—droves of them day after day after day. (I myself have done it twice—and just like the national average, it’s worked in 50 percent of my experience.)

Yet all marriages—from the happiest to the most disillusioned—go through upheavals and changes and stages, and no one (sometimes not even the participants themselves) can accurately predict whether it’s a keeper or not. When I was writing The Stuff That Never Happened, I wanted to show a 28-year-long marriage that almost anyone would describe as successful and happy—happy, that is, except for one thing. The two people involved, Annabelle and Grant, have made a pact never to speak of a secret at the core of their marriage: the fact that in their first chaotic year together, Annabelle fell in love with Grant’s best friend and mentor, and actually left for a while to go off with him.

Ghoul that I am, some of my favorite books are about marriages and delusional secrets, and all the fun and exciting ways in which we deceive ourselves. And when a book about those subjects can make me laugh as well—well, then I’m out buttonholing strangers and friends and forcing them to read right along with  me.

One of my very favorite books about these very subjects is Breathing Lessons by Anne Tyler, the story of two people who are wonderfully mismatched—Maggie is garrulous and scattered and believes that she can get (read: manipulate) the people she loves to do the right thing, while Ira is aloof and precise and thinks that everything is just about to go to hell—and yet they keep plugging along in a marriage that really, despite all its exasperations and mistakes, has a lot of love at its center. Neither Maggie nor Ira undergoes a huge change in the novel, which takes place over the course of one long summer day, but—really, isn’t that reality for you? Anne Tyler creates so many funny, real, and telling moments in this book, passages that make you put the book down and just laugh in recognition.  Read more