Another book review: Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

I listened to an interview with an artist last week who said that the best, most interesting art is art that surprises him. I don’t know enough about art to know if that’s true, but I do know that a book that surprises me is one of my favorite things. This one did.   

Standard Deviation can be read as a funny, absorbing story of marriage, advancing years, raising a special needs child, and managing relationships with relatives, exes, and house guests. Graham is approaching sixty, and his second wife is a younger woman named Audra who has no filter— which is sometimes hilarious and sometimes appalling. Their son Matthew is an endearing Aspy kid with a passion for origami. That version of the story is enough on its own to be funny, heartwarming, and even sometimes wise. I was startled into laughter more times while reading this book than any book in recent memory.

But it seems to me there are other layers, and I’m making my spouse read it now so I can have someone to talk to about this. Am I making it up? Did she really intend to get into the moral ambiguity of the second half of the novel, or am I over-reading? 

(If that sounds intriguing, stop now and go read it, especially if you live nearby and we can go for coffee (tea), because I really would love to discuss this, and you should go into it without knowing the stuff I'm talking about below.)

***spoilers ahead***

I think the way you read the second half depends mostly on whether or not you think Audra is having an affair. I think she is— maybe not with the mysterious Jasper, but what else was she doing in that hotel? She certainly has no problem talking about the multiple married men she slept with before she married Graham. And then you find out that Graham cheated on his first wife not just with Audra, but with Marla, and then later he mentions “all the other Marlas” and you start to wonder if these people are really at all what you thought.

There are a whole lot of layers of truth and falsehood — from the amusing social lies/fabrications that Audra spins effortlessly to the lies of omission from Graham. Is Heiny’s point that speaking truth doesn’t really matter? I've told plenty of social "white lies" myself, usually in the name of not hurting someone's feelings, but I'll say it plainly: the deeper lack of honesty bothers me.

But even I can see that I’m being a bit of a killjoy and a preachy bore to suggest that the fun and hilarity of reading about life with Audra has darker underpinnings. What's the problem with serial adultery if it's so much fun to read about? Graham seems to consciously decide that he doesn’t care if Audra is unfaithful—which is totally his choice—but that’s not the same thing as Heiny as an author giving the impression that telling the truth to your partner doesn’t matter. Is it really true that as long as everything looks good, it is good? As long as we're having so much funnnnn, as the kids say on snapchat, does that automatically mean anything goes?

Or did Heiny actively intend all the intricate, ambiguous implications? Is her point that we lull ourselves into complicity because we want to be in on the joke? Maybe Standard Deviation is a fun-hall mirror of seeing our own distortions.

Or maybe I'm over-reading again. Read it for yourself and see what you think.

(a slightly modified version of the review I posted on Goodreads)

another old post: Long and Winding Road: marriage at midlife

 Originally appeared June 11, 2015. This actually ended up being more posts than I usually do in a week, even though I'm on vacation, I probably should have warned you about that since I know already as I'm typing this on Friday, 7/20, what I'm about to put you through. There's one more midlife marriage post, here, but I decided to just link to it instead of actually re-posting it since I've already put you through enough this week.

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I was flipping through a magazine last fall when I ran across an article about how to have a happy marriage at any age. You know how those articles work--In your twenties, do this. In your thirties, do that. la la la. For "in your fifties," the article said--drumroll, please-- in your fifties, the best predictor for happiness in marriage is a new partner.

I swear I'm not making that up. That's the best they could do? Once you're in your fifties, if you're still married to the same old partner, give it up. Find a new one, or else it's all downhill.

Long-term relationships--and I'm not talking about three years or seven or even ten, but really long term relationships, are a complex topic. No surprise there. If you've been together for a long time, lots of things have happened. You've seen each other at your very best and your very worst, because you've been there, right there, the whole time.

Dean and I are both pretty nice people. We're fairly easy-going, don't fight much, manage our day-to-day life pretty well. But still, each of us could tell you stories about the other that would curl your hair. Not because we're so awful, but because we've been together since 1981, married since 1984, and when you've been together that long, there's no hiding yourself.

You might be able to put up a good front and look awesome for a few years, maybe even six or seven, but after three decades together? Nobody is that good at acting. Just look at the math--even if I only had one total bitch-a-thon every three years, that's eleven bouts of ugliness that Dean has had to live through--and trust me, there have been a lot more than that. With the hormonal mood swings of menopause, we're lucky to make it a week.

So what's a married couple to do? Do we just resign ourselves to living out the rest of our lives in bored tolerance because we don't have the courage to branch out and start a new life? That's the impression that this article gave.

The assumption seemed to be that if you've been married that long, you've changed significantly (and that's true--we have). So there's no way the person you're married to can still be the "right" person. You're better off cutting your losses and finding someone who suits the new you.

Sometimes maybe that's true. But like I said, long-term marriages are complex things. You can't ditch the relationship without ditching years and years of intertwined experience.  In sickness and in health? check. For richer and for poorer? check. Good times and bad? check. You know each other's siblings, you were there when your partner started his/her career, you've watched your children grow up. Perfectly suited or not, there's no replacing that.

I know most of you who read here regularly are in this category--some of you have been married or together longer than we have. So you don't need advice from me. In fact, several of you would do a better job writing this post than I can.

But I'm watching the marriage of some of our dearest friends disintegrate right now, and I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I listen to my friend talk, and many of the things she's upset about are things that I could say about Dean. But we're not splitting up.

What I think I need to tell her is: you just have to let go of the idea that you'd be better off married to someone else. Even though it might be true, no good can come from thinking that. Dean and I don't share many interests outside of our kids, and over the years, we've each grown in different directions. We met and fell in love when we were too young to really know what we wanted. Neither of us is the same person we were when we said our vows. Of course we're not. No one could be nearly 35 years later.

But we're still here, and we still like each other, and even if we're not the ideal partners, we are in this relationship and have been for a long time. It's our reality. We can't ditch each other to find a better-suited partner without losing all those years of inter-mingled experience, the base of solid togetherness that has taken us decades to build.

Would my friend be happier with somebody else? Would I be? Maybe so. Maybe not. There's no way to find out without destroying what we've got, and what we've got is worth quite a bit.

When I was thinking up a title for this post, I tried to decide if a long marriage is a midlife celebration, or a midlife problem, or both--as I sometimes specify in the title. I'm still not sure. You certainly can't be in a 31-year marriage if you're in your twenties, so it's a topic that's specific to middle age.

You know what it is? It's a privilege. To be with someone who has been willing to put up with me for that long, just as I have been willing to put up with him. We're pretty lucky.

Go, us. And all of you who are hanging in there and making it work: Go, us.

7ToF: Sugar, Marriage, and the Mystery of Washi Tape

1. I've tried several food crazes over the years, and none of them has made much of a difference in my health. But here is the one thing that does make me feel better: avoiding sugar. Not carbs in general, because in spite of the fact that all the nutrition gurus say that fruit, white flour, etc. are metabolized by your body in exactly the same way as refined sugar, fruit and white flour don't make me feel sick. But if I eat a big piece of cake or a bunch of cookies, I feel awful.

2. Why is it so hard to avoid sugar? People make their special sugar-y treats and their feelings are hurt if you don't have one. Or the entire office breaks out in an orgy of chocolate for Valentine's, and you're not any fun if you refuse. I would be more than happy to just go to the office party and not have any, but people seriously want you to have some treats. They do not feel neutral about this in the same way that you might feel neutral when you know someone avoids gluten or cheese or animal products.

3. Which is not to say that I'm not tempted. I have a terrible sweet tooth. I could eat a whole plate of cookies, and I've done it before. But I pay for it later, and the older I get and the more my metabolism slows down, the worse it gets. I'm working on this--both my own food choices, and dealing with the choices people want to make for me. I need to come up with some snappy, self-deprecating one-liners to sub in for no, I do not want to eat 2,500 calories of candy before lunch today. It's a strange thing about sugar-y treats that sometimes you have to choose between being kind and your own health.

4. Recommended: If you've been married for a long time, track down the Big Boo Cast podcast and listen to episodes 93 and 94. The Big Boo Cast is run by two women writers that I've been listening to off and on for years. It's always fun-- they just sit and gab, and it's like eavesdropping on the next table at a coffee shop. But their discussion about what it's like to be married for a long time is even better than usual-- it's down-to-earth, hilarious, and wise. I've been married way longer than either of them but I couldn't give you any better advice.

5. I've been looking around for awhile now for a craft project of some sort that I could do in the evenings while we watch TV or listen to an audiobook. I am hopelessly Not Crafty, so there is no simple answer to this--anything that requires a glue gun or a complicated three-page pattern is not going to work. A couple of months ago I read about washi tape somewhere. Washi tape is small rolls of beautifully printed tape that you can use to do various crafty things with. Stock up and check Pinterest for dozens of ideas of what to do! they said.

This isn't even all of it.

6. So I'm thinking: tape. I can do tape. Scissors and tape, that's kindergarten stuff. So I bought a bunch of washi tape--it's everywhere, Target, Michael's, various websites--and it is pretty. Tiny, but there are some really interesting color and design combinations. And then I went and checked out Pinterest for what to do with it.

7. Here's what you can do: Wrap your pencils. Fold it over the edge of a notebook page to color code your pages. Wrap the stems of silk flowers. Whaaaaat? That's it? Do you guys know what to do with it? I have a bunch, all dressed up and nowhere to go. Next time remind me to check Pinterest first.

Day 8: and we lived happily ever after

The post that goes with the previous one is definitely not ready, so on a different topic.... Let's talk about happy endings. Books, stories, movies. I love them. I loved them as a child. I loved them as a teenager.

Then I got to college and learned that happy endings are bad. They're unrealistic. They're sappy and sentimental. They're stupid. The intellectuals surrounding me had nothing but disdain--sneering disdain--for any thing that ended with me smiling and feeling warmly about the human race. Is there any influence that's harder to deflect than sneering disdain?

7ToF except it's Tuesday

1. I got waylaid with a massive migraine yesterday, so today's post (which I usually write on Monday) didn't happen. In fact, at the moment I can't even remember what it was going to be about. I'm feeling much better today, though, which is a good thing because the kid's senior portraits are this afternoon and it would be helpful if I were coherent for that. My brain isn't capable of a regular post today but I thought maybe I could manage a "7 Things" post and I'll do what was going to be today's post on Friday. If I can remember what it was going to be about.

the case of the disputed sofa. or couch. whichever.

About twenty years ago Doug and I decided we needed new living room furniture. We'd been making do for years with a sofa and loveseat that we'd inherited from my parents. I really loved the look of it, but it was literally falling apart. If you put any pressure on the arm of the sofa, it came off.

One thing I learned early on with Doug is that although he is not as opposed to shopping as some people, he does not want to go to every furniture store in town to make sure that the furniture we end up with is the absolute best option in our price range. That's my style of shopping. I shop fast--I can tell within five minutes of walking in a store whether or not I need to stay and look harder--but for a major purchase, I need to be sure we're getting The Right One.

So I pre-shopped. I spent a couple of afternoons going around to every furniture store within reach (which involved a fair amount of driving, because furniture stores aren't exactly thick on the ground around here). I narrowed it down to two choices and took Doug with me to decide. The two choices just happened to be at a store in another town, so it was a bit of a production to find an afternoon he was free, make the drive, entertain our five-year-old, etc etc.

We arrived at the store, and --in a move that would not surprise me now, after thirty years of marriage, but did at that point-- Doug didn't like either one of the sofas I had picked. The sofa he wanted was that one, over there. Which I didn't really like.

We whispered and hissed at each other and made no progress. We decided to take a break and go get something to eat, then returned to the store still without a decision. I finally agreed that we could go with that sofa if we could get different fabric. But that was a special order and a special order was going to cost a bunch more and take six weeks. And we had come all that way, and for some reason I felt like we needed to buy something that day.

So I caved. We bought the sofa I didn't like. I was pissed about that sofa for years. I am not exaggerating. We ended up in marriage counseling a few years later and it was one of the first things I brought up.

The counselor said something that seems so obvious in retrospect that I can't believe I didn't know this, but I didn't: if you're at loggerheads, keep going. If we couldn't find a sofa we both liked at that store, it was time to go to another store. Sometimes you have to make a decision right that minute, but usually decisions aren't that urgent.

The other thing I learned from that marriage counselor is that caving in is never a good idea if you can't do it gracefully. If you're going to be angry and smoldering with resentment--and I was; I'm embarrassed to admit I could be that petty over a piece of furniture, but believe me, I was-- it's not worth it. Better to keep arguing (oops, I mean discussing) than to give in and seethe.

That was complete and utter news to me. I had been raised to keep the peace, and I'm a middle child, so if there's any truth to the birth order stuff, I'm a peacemaker by nature. It had never occurred to me that sometimes you should keep arguing (oops, I mean discussing). Never crossed my mind. Of course you have to argue/discuss/fight fairly and use good communication techniques, but still: you keep disagreeing until you figure out a way to resolve the disagreement. Or else you just keep disagreeing without pretending you agree.

So there's my bit of marital wisdom for today. I only have two further things to say about this story. One, I'm not sure why I'm telling you this because just about everyone I know who reads here has been married or together as long as we have and you probably learned this a long time ago. It's just what came to mind when I was thinking of a topic this morning.

Two, what is the difference between a couch and a sofa? I thought maybe it was regional--I've lived enough different places that I can no longer keep track of who says what where. But according to everything I found, sofa and couch are exactly interchangeable everywhere in the US, although I did find one article that argued that a sofa is slightly more formal than a couch. Arbitrarily I went with sofa, although there's nothing formal about our house.

That's all. The cruise was fun, and I had a great time with my mom. I'll tell you more about it on Friday.

further thoughts on marriage at midlife

We had a really nice vacation last week, so of course I'm having a bit of trouble getting back into the normal routine. I thought about skipping yet another post, but I have this one that I wrote a long time ago--before the first one on long-term marriages, as you'll be able to tell. I've had second thoughts (and third and fourth) about posting this (that's why it's been sitting in my drafts folder so long), but I'm sure I've told you worse before, so here you go.

This is a story I'm a little embarrassed to tell you: about a year ago, I discovered what I thought was incontrovertible evidence that Dean was having an affair. Actually, I had discovered it several months previously, but Dean is such a solid guy that it took me that long to suddenly realize, OHMYGOD, what is going on here?

So, I won't keep you in suspense--he wasn't, it was just a remarkably odd series of coincidences. But I didn't know that at first.

I had to figure out what to do, and that took awhile. In fact, it was several months before I said anything to him. Which surprised me. If you had asked me ahead of time, I would have told you in no uncertain terms that if my spouse had an affair, that would be the end of our marriage right then and there.

But when it happened to me (leaving aside for the moment that it really didn't), I had remarkably mixed feelings. A long marriage is a complicated thing. It's being tangled up with each other's families, knowing what it was like when you got your first real job, house-hunting together, inside jokes, taking vacations, changing diapers and going to seventh grade band concerts, making mutual friends, and a million other little ways that your lives get tied up together.

It seriously occurred to me that maybe I should just let it go. If I'd been that much in the dark about how he felt about me, and I didn't really want our marriage to end, maybe I'd be better off just continuing to act like I didn't know. It turns out I wasn't quite as adamant about monogamy as I thought I would be. Once I finally talked to Dean, and realized he wasn't having an affair, I still had a lot to think about.

It was after all that had happened that I read Dan Savage's book American Savage several months ago. The first chapter, it just so happens, is about monogamy, about how much our culture prizes it even though human beings aren't very good at it.

It's a very complicated topic, and Savage does a great job detailing all the ways that we are hypocritical about our ideas of what marriage "should" be like. It's thought-provoking reading, and if it's a topic that interests you, I highly recommend it.

Unusually for Savage, he comes down on the side of conservatives in this one area--he thinks marriage is really important, and that preserving marriages, preserving families, is worth doing, even if it is at the expense of strict monogamy. Is someone who has had one brief affair in 30 years of marriage bad at monogamy? Maybe not. Maybe letting that go is better than tearing a family apart.

Savage goes one step further, though, and says that in some cases, maybe it is OK to cheat if doing so will "save" your marriage. I just can't wrap my head around that. I mean, if both spouses have agreed up front that they're OK with this, I'm not going to argue--everybody gets to set up their marriage the way they want. But like most couples, Dean and I don't have that agreement, and I just can't see that all the lies, deception, and manipulation involved in cheating on your spouse can possibly be a good thing.

It's an argument that's far too complex to deal with in a blog post, but it's an interesting topic to bring up with your spouse. If you're like us, we'd never talked about the basic idea of monogamy, it was just a given in our marriage vows and in the way we thought about our marriage. Neither of us has ever been unfaithful, but it was good to actually talk about it, talk about how hard it has been at times, and how much it means to us that neither of us has ever had sex with anyone else.

So there were two reasons I never posted this--one was because it's probably TMI, and the other was because it didn't really go anywhere. Really it's like shooting fish in a barrel to say that hey, I'm opposed to cheating on your spouse. So, I don't have any wisdom to impart. Just stuff I've been thinking about. I will try to be more interesting next time.

p.s. It's occurring to me a day later that talking to your spouse about monogamy might lead to information you'd rather not know (see above). So, a la Hill Street Blues, be careful out there, people.

Long and Winding Road: marriage at midlife

I was flipping through a magazine last fall when I ran across an article about how to have a happy marriage at any age. You know how those articles work--In your twenties, do this. In your thirties, do that. la la la. For "in your fifties," the article said--drumroll, please-- in your fifties, the best predictor for happiness in marriage is a new partner.

I swear I'm not making that up. That's the best they could do? Once you're in your fifties, if you're still married to the same old partner, give it up. Find a new one, or else it's all downhill.

Long-term relationships--and I'm not talking about three years or seven or even ten, but really long term relationships, are a complex topic. No surprise there. If you've been together for a long time, lots of things have happened. You've seen each other at your very best and your very worst, because you've been there, right there, the whole time.

Dean and I are both pretty nice people. We're fairly easy-going, don't fight much, manage our day-to-day life pretty well. But still, each of us could tell you stories about the other that would curl your hair. Not because we're so awful, but because we've been together since 1981, married since 1984, and when you've been together that long, there's no hiding yourself.

You might be able to put up a good front and look awesome for a few years, maybe even six or seven, but after three decades together? Nobody is that good at acting. Just look at the math--even if I only had one total bitch-a-thon every three years, that's eleven bouts of ugliness that Dean has had to live through--and trust me, there have been a lot more than that. With the hormonal mood swings of menopause, we're lucky to make it a week.

So what's a married couple to do? Do we just resign ourselves to living out the rest of our lives in bored tolerance because we don't have the courage to branch out and start a new life? That's the impression that this article gave.

The assumption seemed to be that if you've been married that long, you've changed significantly (and that's true--we have). So there's no way the person you're married to can still be the "right" person. You're better off cutting your losses and finding someone who suits the new you.

Sometimes maybe that's true. But like I said, long-term marriages are complex things. You can't ditch the relationship without ditching years and years of intertwined experience.  In sickness and in health? check. For richer and for poorer? check. Good times and bad? check. You know each other's siblings, you were there when your partner started his/her career, you've watched your children grow up. Perfectly suited or not, there's no replacing that.

I know most of you who read here regularly are in this category--some of you have been married or together longer than we have. So you don't need advice from me. In fact, several of you would do a better job writing this post than I can.

But I'm watching the marriage of some of our dearest friends disintegrate right now, and I've been thinking about this quite a bit. I listen to my friend talk, and many of the things she's upset about are things that I could say about Dean. But we're not splitting up.

What I think I need to tell her is: you just have to let go of the idea that you'd be better off married to someone else. Even though it might be true, no good can come from thinking that. Dean and I don't share many interests outside of our kids, and over the years, we've each grown in different directions. We met and fell in love when we were too young to really know what we wanted. Neither of us is the same person we were when we said our vows. Of course we're not. No one could be nearly 35 years later.

But we're still here, and we still like each other, and even if we're not the ideal partners, we are in this relationship and have been for a long time. It's our reality. We can't ditch each other to find a better-suited partner without losing all those years of inter-mingled experience, the base of solid togetherness that has taken us decades to build.

Would my friend be happier with somebody else? Would I be? Maybe so. Maybe not. There's no way to find out without destroying what we've got, and what we've got is worth quite a bit.

When I was thinking up a title for this post, I tried to decide if a long marriage is a midlife celebration, or a midlife problem, or both--as I sometimes specify in the title. I'm still not sure. You certainly can't be in a 31-year marriage if you're in your twenties, so it's a topic that's specific to middle age.

You know what it is? It's a privilege. To be with someone who has been willing to put up with me for that long, just as I have been willing to put up with him. We're pretty lucky.

Go, us. And all of you who are hanging in there and making it work: Go, us.