LIT FOR LIVING: Reality Show

Many writers complain that their least favorite question, from readers or interviewers, is the one that asks how much of their novel is autobiographical. This time around, author and screenwriter Rafael Yglesias preempts such questioning by embracing and even loudly confessing the autobiographical nature of his latest novel, A Happy Marriage.

Yglesias readily admits that the character of Enrique is a stand-in for himself. Like Yglesias, Enrique is also a novelist who has had some very early success, a precocious prodigy who dropped out of high school and published a first novel by the time he was seventeen. (Yglesias’s first novel, published when he was seventeen, was called Hide Fox, and All After.) Both the author and his character have parents who were novelists. And Enrique, like Yglesias, also struggles as a novelist and later turns to screenwriting as a means to better support his family. (A Happy Marriage is, in fact, the first novel Yglesias has published in thirteen years since devoting his time primarily to screenplays.) And both Yglesias and his fictional doppelgänger have two grown sons.

But perhaps most important, both incarnations—real and fictional—are married to women named Margaret who die of cancer while in their early fifties. Only the names have been changed, and not even all of these: the fictional Margaret is named after the real one. (In a recent interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air, Yglesias explained that he used the name Margaret when writing the novel in order to fully summon his wife, and then when the novel was completed, said it felt silly to invent another.) More interesting, though, than mere name changes, was Yglesias’s decision in the first place to write his story as a novel as opposed to a memoir.

Yglesias’s reasoning has to do with the back-and-forth structure of his story, his desire to dramatize the period of time when the couple first meets and falls in love (at the ages of twenty-one for Enrique and twenty-four for Margaret) and the last two weeks of Margaret’s life, when she somewhat deliberately chooses the timing of her death by stopping her intake of fluids in order to hasten her end. (Additional episodes from the middle of the marriage are later, and more briefly, explored.)
By writing it as a novel, Yglesias reasoned he could more easily have his readers be “very present” throughout the early, middle, and late years of the marriage, experiencing them in roughly the same way his characters do. Yglesias also felt the need to compress certain conversations and couldn’t remember others, ones that took place years ago, and therefore realized he’d need to reinvent them. One more reason, he felt, to “make it into ‘art,’ rather than reportage.”

Given that he did choose to write it as a novel, however, Yglesias deserves a lot of credit for refusing to sugarcoat or improve upon what we can only assume are real events, especially given the depiction of a quite flawed Enrique and Margaret. It’s safe to say that Yglesias felt that an honest appraisal of a “real marriage” isn’t about retouching its history in order to make it more palatable for readers or more flattering for its author. But then this is what makes all the difference: knowing and feeling that we are being offered something that feels unflinchingly truthful, we find ourselves unable to look away.

It’s not hard to see why Yglesias failed at earlier attempts to write this novel when his wife was still alive. Besides feeling it was an invasion of her privacy, Yglesias found it impossible to be completely candid about an ongoing marriage rather than one that had ended—when he knew his wife would, in effect, be reading over his shoulder. This, too, perhaps refers more specifically to a rather startling affair that Enrique embarks upon with one of Margaret’s best and oldest friends, an affair about which, though it lasts nearly a year, the fictional Margaret never learns, not even on her deathbed. Given the realism of the rest of the novel, it’s certainly reasonable to wonder if this, too, reflects real events in the author’s life, and how impossible it would therefore have been to write when the real Margaret was still alive. 

He was brimming with love, a deep, passionate, mature love that also happened to be illicit. This was nothing like that mirage of love he had felt for Margaret, which had soon enough turned into the bourgeois drudgery of a marriage, a humorless schoolgirl’s notion of life: a brutal routine of dawn risings to the stale smell of bottle formula, the slow spooning of puréed vegetables, and then the early to bed reeking of the alcohol of baby wipes.…
 

The other big chunk of the novel is, of course, spent on Margaret’s illness, which is also carefully documented, down to the specifics of her rolling around unknowingly in her own excrement while Enrique cleans up after her during a particularly restless night, unable to keep up with the need for clean sheets. If there’s been a more meticulous recording of a person dying in fiction, or nonfiction, in recent years, I certainly haven’t come across it.

And yet it’s this juxtaposition and tension between young and old love, life and death, connection and disconnection, strength and weakness, grief and gratitude, deprivation and generosity that make for an intense and very adult read. Despite knowing ahead of time where all this is going, Yglesias still manages to create a not entirely pessimistic, and certainly suspenseful, ending, increasing the pace of the back and forth in the final chapters so that we are simultaneously turning pages to find out whether Enrique will get to say his last, satisfying goodbye to a dying Margaret before she loses consciousness, as well as whether or not, as their younger selves, Margaret and Enrique will manage to create that first, memorable spark that will launch them into all that comes after. Margaret’s younger self says to him:
   

“… if you go inside me, you’ll never get away.” …She put her lips to his ear and whispered warm while cool hands pressed on his back and steered him all the way into her. “You’ll never get away. You’ll move in with me, we’ll get married, we’ll have children. You’ll be here forever,” she whispered.

Of course, nothing is forever, as this novel all too clearly demonstrates. But there is a kind of quiet, ongoing eternity to the thousands of moments that make up a marriage. And surprising as it may seem, a novel that documents this makes for a profound, personal, and riveting read. [NOV/DEC 2009]

Chris Newbound is managing editor of Berkshire Living. For more book reviews, and blogposts, go to www.berkshireliving.com

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