A Happy Marriage

A Novel

By: Rafael Yglesias

Narrated by: Grover Gardner

A Happy Marriage is both intimate and expansive: It is the story of Enrique Sabas and his wife, Margaret, a novel that alternates between the romantic misadventures of the first weeks of their courtship and the final months of Margaret’s life as she says good-bye to her family, friends, children, and Enrique. Spanning 30 years, this achingly honest story is about what it means for two people to spend a lifetime together and what makes a happy marriage. Bold, elegiac, and emotionally suspenseful, Yglesias’s beautiful novel will break every reader’s heart while encouraging all of us with its clear-eyed evocation of the enduring value of marriage.

Yglesias's career as a novelist began in 1970 when he wrote an autobiographical novel at sixteen, hailed by critics for its stunning and revelatory depiction of adolescence. A Happy Marriage, his first work of fiction in thirteen years, was inspired by his relationship with his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004.

©2009 Rafael Yglesias (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A] devastatingly raw appraisal of a nearly 30-year marriage...heart-wrenching." ( Publishers Weekly)

"A profound deliberation on the nature of love, marriage, and the process of dying....A tour de force...[Yglesias] has found the novel of his life." ( The New York Times)

A beautiful love story

I so enjoyed this story. It was told with such raw emotion and made me laugh and cry from beginning to end. The narrator was excellent and pulled me into the story with such ease. I highly recommend…I am ready to listen to it again. Thank you!

what??

this book starts with the premise of a life lived together. Unfortunately it introduced death and illness immediately. it's a huge tear jerker but the book ends with Enrique admitting cheating and never really loving his wife.... until he realizes it bc she's almost dead. no explanation in the whole book of happy years together. no memories of married life in happiness. just misery once the marriage started. I do not recommend if you are deeply in love and love being married. If these are the inner thoughts of all married men..... it's horrible.

Heartbreaking and beautiful

The narrator is perfect for this book, and I'm a HUGE fan of Yglesias's narrative voice. His characters are likeable and human, flawed and petty and gorgeous, and I'm completely taken with the story, as heartbreaking as it is.

the story the beginning and the end of a marriage

hard to listen to at times, the ups and downs of a romance and real life marrriage and death of a spouse.

A Difficult Review -- A Difficult Read

I did not want to "like" this book. You cannot begin to read a nonfiction book that is an account of a husband loosing his wife to cancer after a long and predominately happy marriage and expect to "like" it. But I wanted to appreciate the fact that the author shared something of her personal life and unfortunate death with total strangers and consider how I would feel if an unimaginable situation was suddenly not only imaginable but real. I hoped to get a sense of the cathartic experience writing the book must have been for the author.

But I didn't. For a memoir about the life and death of a beloved spouse, this book seemed focused not on the dying spouse, but the living one, the one who wrote the book. His wife's life seemed to be nothing more than another adjective used to help describe the author, his challenges, his difficulties, his life. Her relevance, her reason for even being mentioned in the book seemed to be solely to help the reader understand the author better.

I would not presume to say that the author did not love his wife. The book doesn't indicate that at all. I came away with no sense about how he felt about his wife, other than as an extension and reflection of him. But I have never lost a spouse and focusing on oneself instead of the lost partner may be a normal way most survivors of a long term relationship cope. They just don't write a book about it. I wish he would not have either.