Molly's Reads

Molly's Reads

Closeup of books stacked on a bookshelf
Return to All Categories

WEDDING/NEW MARRIAGE

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS
  • Young Wives’ Tales: New Adventures in Love and Partnership Edited by Jill Corral and Lisa Miya-Jervis. Foreword by bell hooks.

    • Published by Seal Press, 2001

    Amazon Link

    Take separate vacations. He skis and rafts with his friends, you hike and spa with yours. On the nights of your returns, he fills the bedroom with candles. He is not your vacation; he is your home. [Sex and the Shacked-Up Girl by Stacy Bierlein]

  • Well Groomed: A Wedding Planner for What’s-His-Name (and His Bride) by Peter Scott.

    • Published by Bloomsbury USA, 2006

    Amazon Link

    Whatever image you choose, you’ll want to order at least a dozen prints so you can put them in picture frames and give them to everyone in your family as Christmas presents. This is a monumental turning point in your life. you can now start giving pictures of yourself as presents, even though you know that the recipients of these gifts probably don’t want them.

  • There’s a Spouse in My House: A Humorous Journey Through the First Years of Marriage by Peter Scott.

    • Published by Plume, 2008

    Amazon Link

    That’s right. Your spouse is the only person on the planet with whom you could possibly have a disagreement about the location of the ketchup because he or she is the only person on the planet who even cares where the ketchup is supposed to be. It takes a lot of intimacy to know these details. And intimacy is wonderful.

  • Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride by Lucy Knisley.

    • Published by First Second, 2016

    Amazon Link

    The strangest part I’ve found about being an adult is that I kept waiting for my life to feel the way other people’s lives felt, viewed by me, the outsider. We make our own adulthood.

  • Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give by Ada Calhoun.

    • Published by W. W. Norton & Company, 2018

    Amazon Link

    “The hardest lesson in a marriage,” says my friend Asia, “is understanding the truth of the other person, believing in your heart that they are as real as you are, and their feelings matter as much. We all think that when something is wrong it will feel wrong to us, but that’s the biggest lie. So many things that your partner will see as betrayal will feel to you like nothing. One of the biggest challenges of marriage is to acknowledge that your own feelings aren’t the end of the story. We have to hold so many realities at once: here’s me, here’s you, here’s us, here’s the rest of the world.”

  • How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents about Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage by Jo Piazza.

    • Published by Harmony, 2018

    Amazon Link

    There are no steps. This advice from the Megs is something we tell ourselves often. Don’t make the next move (buying a house, having a baby, having another baby, buying a second house) because it feels like that the next step. There are no steps. Just enjoy each other. Let the marriage unfold the way it’s supposed to rather than looking for the next big step

  • The Longest Date: Life as a Wife by Cindy Chupack.

    • Published by Viking, 2014

    Amazon Link

    So it was hilariously predictable that, like every other rom-com heroine, I found my happy ending when I least expected it, music up, wedding montage, cue credits! Or not. Turns out “happily ever after” is the epitome of lazy writing

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – QUEER
  • The Commitment: Love, Sex, Marriage, and My Family by Dan Savage.

    • Published by Dutton Adult, 2005

    Amazon Link
ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS – GRAPHIC
  • The Real Thing: Lessons on Love and Life from a Wedding Reporter’s Notebook by Ellen McCarthy.

    • Published by Ballantine Books, 2015

    Amazon Link

    “What do you think is the one word I hear most often when people explain why they chose the person they did to spend the rest of their life with?” …The word, I told them, was comfortable. Seventy to 80 percent of the couples I interview talk about how comfortable they feel with each other.

MARRIAGE

SOCIAL SCIENCE
  • How to Make Love to the Same Person for the Rest of Your Life* *and Still Love It by Dagmar O’Connor.

    • Published by Doubleday, 1985

    Amazon Link

    Invariably, when I ask a couple how often they have sex, after answering they say, “Is that normal?” or, “Are we within the normal range?” And I reply, “Normal for what? Your age? Your weight? Are you asking me if you are average? Are you average in everything else you do? Is that what you want to be?”

  • The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work: A Practical Guide from the Country's Foremost Relationship Expert by John Gottman, PhD and Nan Silver.

    • Published by Harmony, 2015

    Amazon Link
  • Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence by Esther Perel.

    • Published by Harper Paperbacks, 2017

    Amazon Link

    “Is the titillation of seduction only the privilege of those who date?” I ask Dominick. “Just because you live with someone doesn’t necessarily mean he’s readily available. If anything, he requires more attention, not less…."

ANTHOLOGIES/MEMOIRS
  • But You Seemed So Happy: A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits by Kimberly Harrington.

    • Published by Harper Perennial, 2021

    Amazon Link

    You now eat meals together, the same meal. This is the expectation. Obviously you can snack on whatever you want. But snacking is different than meals, especially dinner meals. Did you always eat the same dinner as, say, your college roommates? No? Well that’s over now. You and your favorite person eat the same thing almost every night, together. Because guess that, that’s how this works. If you don’t eat the same meal, people will write articles about the dangers of making different meals. Just watch. Yum-yum!

  • Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky.

    • Published by Ecco, 2022

    Amazon Link

    What kind of an old-fashioned mutant could crave such a primitive trap, particularly when it’s paired with an enormously expensive ceremony that often includes allusions to obedience and lifelong mutual suffering and death, of all things? And why do we arbitrarily marry one person instead of say, two or three or fifteen? Doesn’t that place an inordinate amount of pressure on one very fragile penguin?

NOVELS
  • On Love by Alain de Botton.

    • Published by Grove Press, 2006

    Amazon Link

    With her departure had gone all desire to keep up with the present. I lived nostalgically – that is, with constant reference to my life as it had been with her. My eyes were never really open; they looked backward and inward to memory. I would have wished to spend the rest of my days following the camel, meandering through the dunes of yesteryear, stopping at charming oases to leaf through images of happier days. The present held nothing for me; the past had become the only inhabitable tense. What could the present be next to it but a mocking reminder of the one who was missing? What could the future hold beside yet more wretched absence?

  • Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert.

    • Published by Riverhead Books, 2011

    Amazon Link

    The poet Jack Gilbert wrote that marriage is what happens “between the memorable.” He said that we often look back on our marriage years later, perhaps after one spouse has died, and all we can recall are “the vacation, and emergencies” – the high points and low points. The rest of it blends into a blurry sort of daily sameness. But it is that very blurred sameness, the poet argues, that comprises marriage. Marriage is those two thousand indistinguishable conversations, chatted over two thousand indistinguishable breakfasts, where intimacy turns like a slow wheel. How do you measure the worth of becoming that familiar to somebody – so utterly well known and so thoroughly ever-present that you become an almost invisible necessity, like air?

  • The Arrangement by Sarah Dunn.

    • Published by Little, Brown and Company, 2017

    Amazon Link

    She hated that woman, the juicy woman, because she was standing in line with her two adorable kids climbing up her legs, complaining into her cell phone about wanting something juicy in her life. But now it was many years later, and Lucy had gotten what she wanted: a child. They’d left the city so they could afford a decent house. She and Owen had a happy marriage. She had close friends, a nice community. But she did not have juicy. She was a lifetime away from juicy, she was miles, light-years, eons away from juicy, and now it seemed that juicy was what she wanted.

  • The Course of Love: A Novel by Alain de Botton.

    • Published by Simon & Schuster, 2017

    Amazon Link

    The partner truly best suited to use is not the one who miraculously happens to share every taste but the one who can negotiate differences in taste with intelligence and good grace. Rather than some notional ideal of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity of tolerate dissimilarity that is the true marker of the “right” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn’t be its precondition.

  • Listen to the Marriage by John Jay Osborn.

    • Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018

    Amazon Link

    You don’t feel it? Sandy thought. You feel it so much you were ready to divorce Steve. The marriage is so powerful that you want to kill Steve for hurting it. You have been hurt so much because the marriage was so important.

  • Love Poems (for Married People) by John Kenney.

    • Published by G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2018

    Amazon Link

    Bedtime: Now we are in the bedroom in our underpants. / Let’s turn down the lights. / No, further. / Off, I guess, is the technical term.