Stuff
Rafael Yglesias Revealed
On Books and Writing
- Q. How did you come to write Happy Marriage?
- A. I’ve been a writer my entire adult life. After the death of my wife of twenty-seven years, as part of the grieving process I found myself thinking about our marriage in a way I never dared, or could have while she was alive. After a few years of this reviewing and recollection of my marriage I realized that I could write about our life together with a frankness that would be cathartic for me, and might be useful for readers in thinking about their marriages. I chose to write it as a novel, and not as a memoir, because I wanted to preserve the frankness of my private thoughts and feelings while telling the story. I believe what William Dean Howells once put this way, “No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it.” I doubt any human being is capable of writing with absolute honesty about himself—we are all too skilled at self-deception—but the sad combination of losing my wife and needing to go on with my work, led me to hope that by writing A Happy Marriage I could provide readers with an unusually intimate portrait of marriage from a man’s point of view.
