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No Cheating, No Dying: I Had A Good Marriage. Then I Tried To Make It Better. (2012)

by Elizabeth Weil(Favorite Author)

3.04 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

1439168229 (ISBN13: 9781439168226)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

Scribner

review 1: A quick, fun read. I finished in 3 days and enjoyed Weil's writing. It's a refreshing book offering insight into how one couple has made it through challenging and delightful times together. It was nice to read a book that neither praised marriage unendingly nor disparaged it as an institution. It also isn't trying to be an advice book, or provide the reader with a prescribed message. Rather, it simply seems an honest account of one woman's journey so far within her particular marriage. I enjoyed Weil's candor as well as her re-counting of the various activities and research she did in pursuit of a better marriage. It's enjoyable to have this glimpse into a couple's intimate world. In this telling of navigating raising children, house re-modeling, in-law relationships, and... more even meal preparation, the book brings out both the mundane and life-altering details of two people building a life together. Just reading the questions Weil asks, the thoughts she thinks, the growth she feels, made me feel far less alone in my own thoughts and questions and fears of marriage. Plus as a single woman, there's a demystifying of the marriage relationship. Layers of the relationship are peeled back, laying bare stories and feelings that even your closest friends would be timid to share with you about their own marriages. Part of what works best is Weil's ability to be so vulnerable with the reader.
review 2: This book was oddly riveting, though not especially illuminating. In some ways, it confirmed my suspicion that if you want to have a good marriage, you should read more great lit and fewer marriage books. The idea that a marriage is something to improve, rather than something to protect, seems to be the fundamental conflict the author, Elizabeth Weil, encounters again and again. I confess I found myself looking over the rim of this book at my sweetheart, comparing our circumstances and failures to those of the author and her husband. “Yeah!” I’d think indignantly on occasion, and pointedly read some excerpt to my startled darling. What are we to do when examining our conflicts and disappointments? It’s, in a way, a lazy approach to a relationship. How easy it is to seek all the ways your partner hems liberty, brings complicating entanglements, even burdens you. It takes no effort at all to detail the inconveniences and trials of wedded love. Yet Weil is clever and self-aware. She makes many remarks on the dangers of examining their fights, and she writes wryly on the centuries of advice various cultures put forward. While I wasn’t enlightened by her book, I liked her. And perhaps Weil’s book is worth reading because, if nothing else, it reveals how admirable, necessary, and difficult it is to defend your marriage against the myriad assaults of exhaustion, regret, and the panoply of selfish foibles that surface in the course of a life together. Weil goes through many trials and writes a lot of pages to arrive at a conclusion that makes you think, “Well…of course.” The challenge of marriage isn’t figuring out you should be kind and hopeful. It’s the being kind and hopeful that’s problematic. Therapy, counseling, and community center seminars might help, yes. And Weil points out the practical guidance can be surprisingly useful. But it’s an oddly empty approach. Perhaps marriage requires a kind of refining of the soul. It is the commandment to live well and generously. Facing that challenge takes a lifetime. And Shakespeare. less

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