The Honeymoon’s Over
True Stories of Love, Marriage, and Divorce
by Edited by Andrea Chapin and Sally Wofford-Girand
Includes original essays by Terry McMillan, Joyce Maynard, Laura
Fraser, Ann Hood, Martha McPhee and many more
This is a difficult book to pick
up... and an even more difficult one to put down! The book holds
between its covers twenty-two original essays with remarkable and
often painful insights into falling in love, being in love, marriage,
divorce, death, remarriage. Lesbians have a voice, and male readers
are welcome in this foray to try to understand the mysteries behind
love and marriage. As the editors state in their acknowledgements,
"...It is comforting and cathartic to know we are not alone."
What inspired these diverse women writers to pick open scabs often healed over, to bare their pain to their
readers? The essays talk about choices when "enough is enough," and when trying one last time paid remarkable
dividends. Although the essays are often raw, and edited with a too-light touch, the rhythm and beat of each
woman’s exploration of an intimate love relationship is much like looking in a mirror. Whether happily married,
happily single or somewhere in-between, the stories provide fodder for our own imaginations, dreams and
unexpressed wishful thoughts.
Leslie Lehr writes movingly of changes and finding a new style and rightness to life after 18 years of
marriage, of learning to hammer out care of the children, re-learning lifestyles and habits long subjugated to a
husband, and discovering she was happy with the "her" she had become, without the wedding rings and the man.
Patricia McCormick writes with a touch of irony and humor about her "electric husband," discovered during a
period of separation from her husband. This vibrator became her way to view a world without her husband, learning
to live alone and like it. Although she and her husband hammered through their separation, and emerged strong and
with a renewed courage to face marriage together, she never let go of the lessons from the break. She still
maintains a tiny apartment of her own, an escape hole, and a place to talk to herself and rejuvenate her creative
spirit.
There is more to these essays than just a pouring out of angst; each story reverberates with the reader,
whether or not the reader’s experience echoes the authors’ or not. We learn that there is strength found in the
struggle. And, that even when relationships don’t work out, and an uncertain future needs to be faced, maintaining
a vigorous and honest approach to life lifts even the most devastated woman out of the slough of despond into the
ripe richness of new relationships and enhanced enjoyment of the love they share with their children, parents,
siblings and friends. |
The Reviewer |
Laura Strathman Hulka |
Reviewed 2007 |
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