The 10 Definitive Books On Marriage

Marriage is an enduring subject in literature and popular culture. Let these 10 books draw you into the conversation.

Here are 10 authors who have written about marriage in myriad ways – its history as an institution, its advantages and downsides, how it works as a mirror for our best and worst traits, and what makes it last.

Recent figures from Stats NZ show that the number of marriages, along with civil unions and divorces, is steadily decreasing in New Zealand – a reflection of global trends.

These works examine why we marry – or choose not to, and why we stay together or break up, through the mediums of biographical writing, novels and non-fiction.

On Marriage

By Devorah Baum (Penguin Books Ltd, $54)

Author, professor and film director Devorah Baum’s On Marriage, originally published in 2023, examines “the world’s most enduring and universal” institution.

Drawing from history and literature, she explores why we still choose to marry – though statistics show that fewer people are getting married, and divorced, today than ever before.

Is it for safety and financial security, for tradition’s sake or religious reasons, to comply with social expectations, or is it the ultimate expression of love for another person? What of those of us who choose not to marry in societies designed around the traditional family unit?

Baum references George Eliot, Nora Ephron and many others who have written extensively about marriage over the centuries as social attitudes have shifted. She concludes that, like many other human experiences, it’s a subjective one.

The Two-Parent Privilege

By Melissa S. Kearney (Swift Press, $60)

The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind by Melissa S. Kearney draws on data to make an economic argument for the nuclear family.

Kearney, a professor of economics at the University of Maryland, uses more than 10 years of research to argue that the biggest privilege or indicator of success for a child is having two married parents.

She steers clear of faith-based arguments for marriage, instead relying on the numbers – which historically show the lives of married adults are typically more comfortable than those of unmarried or single parents, and lead to better educational and behavioural outcomes for their children.

Kearney adds the disclaimer that she’s not advocating for a return to the patriarchal marriage structures of the past, when women had few options other than marriage to secure their futures, and that it’s not a one-size-fits-all institution, writing, “The answer is not nearly as straightforward as simply declaring that more parents should get married.”

Laughing at the Dark

By Barbara Else (Penguin Group NZ, $40)

Bestselling New Zealand writer Barbara Else, known for her countless short stories, plays, and novels, published her heartfelt memoir Laughing at the Dark in 2023.

In the book, Else looks back at her life while undergoing treatment for cancer. Now 78, she married for the first time in 1968 – an era when many wives did not know what their husbands earned and were limited to working in the home.

Her husband, Jim Neale, an academic, dismissed her writing and virtually ignored her needs – in one passage, he barely reacts when she reveals she has been sexually harassed by another writer.

It was writing, however, that led Else to meet her second husband, Chris, also an author. She contrasts her second, more compatible marriage with her first, showing how it helped her grow as a writer and publish the likes of The Warrior Queen, The Travelling Restaurant, and the children’s storybook Go Girl, among many others.

The Year of Magical Thinking

By Joan Didion (HarperCollins, $33)

Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking recounts the year following the death of the author’s husband, John Gregory Dunne.

It’s a memoir shaped by grief and an account of their marriage of 40 years, which was also a decades-long working partnership. Both writers, they collaborated on several screenplays together and wrote their books side by side.

In 2003, Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack. As Didion writes in the opening lines, “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends”.

In the book, she explores what it’s like to lose the person with whom you have intertwined your existence, for better or worse. She tries to “make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself”.

The Marriage Question

By Clare Carlisle (Penguin Books Ltd, $47)

In The Marriage Question: George Eliot’s Double Life, Clare Carlisle looks at the life and work of the writer behind the classic novels The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch, real name Mary Anne Evans.

Evans, who explored the idea of marriage in her works, caused a stir in Victorian society when she moved in with G.H. Lewes, a married man – and when she married a younger man, John Cross, after Lewes died in 1878.

Evans famously went by Mrs Lewes throughout the relationship and dedicated her books to her “husband”, though they never legally married – and thought of marriage as “a double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength”.

Carlisle explores the writer’s real-life relationships and the fates of her heroines, who were also concerned with the question of marriage in Victorian England.

Left on Tenth

By Delia Ephron (Transworld Publishers Ltd, $34)

Left on Tenth is a memoir detailing a series of heartbreaks. First, Delia Ephron loses her sister Nora – of Heartburn and When Harry Met Sally fame – and then her husband of 40 years, Jerry, to cancer.

Peter, who would become her second husband, reached out to her in response to a piece she wrote for the New York Times about her struggles with her internet provider – and to remind her that they had gone on a date once upon a time.

Reconnecting in their 70s, the couple were just a few months into a relationship when Ephron was diagnosed with leukaemia. The book contrasts the joy and excitement of finding love a second time with the harrowing experience of undergoing cancer treatment.

As Ephron herself writes in the opening pages, “I was left on Tenth when my husband died, and after that, life took many left turns, some perilous, some wondrous. This book is about all of them.”

Wifedom

By Anna Funder (Penguin Books Ltd, $38)

In Wifedom: Mrs Orwell’s Invisible Life, Anna Funder explores the life of Eileen O’Shaughnessy, the wife of George Orwell – real name Eric Blair.

Having discovered references to the marriage in letters O’Shaugnessy wrote to a friend, Funder suggests there was a darker side to the couple’s relationship than previously thought.

She notes that several biographies of Orwell leave out or minimise his wife’s role in and contributions to his life and work. Herself a poet and psychologist, O’Shaughnessy took care of the couple’s farm, raised their adopted son, edited her husband’s work, typed up his manuscripts and took on several jobs to support him as he wrote – while he is known to have had several affairs during their marriage.

In her book, Funder imagines scenes between the couple that may have taken place in their home, contrasting the values he describes in his books about political power with the shortcomings of his private life.

Light Years

By James Salter (Penguin Books Ltd, $34)

Award-winning writer James Salter’s Light Years, originally published in 1975, is a bittersweet portrayal of a marriage in which all is not as it seems.

Characters Nedra and Viri Berland, living in upstate New York in the 50s and 60s, seem to be the picture-perfect couple living an enviable life with each other, their daughters Franca and Danny, and their circle of friends.

But unbeknownst to each other, they are both having affairs and longing to be elsewhere, exploring other possibilities for their lives.

The book spans 15 years of their relationship as they navigate career changes, illness, ageing, loss, and their eventual split – all while watching their children grow up into their own “light years”.

This is the Story of a Happy Marriage

By Ann Patchett (Bloomsbury, $35)

Ann Patchett, award-winning author of Bel Canto and Tom Lake, turns her pen to memoir in this collection of freelance essays – some recent, some drawn from her work published in magazines over the years.

The writer looks back at her childhood, her development as a writer, and her two marriages.

Patchett recounts her first, unhappy marriage in the essay The Sacrament of Divorce. She was in her early 20s and the marriage lasted only about a year before the couple divorced.

The title essay, This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, contrasts this with her second marriage. Wary of history repeating itself, Patchett waited 11 years to marry and move in with her husband, Karl VanDevender – the titular “happy marriage”.

Make Love Work

Nic Beets (Allen & Unwin, $37)

Clinical psychologist and family therapist Nic Beets, a New Zealander based in Waihī, published Make Love Work – A practical guide to relationship success in 2023.

He and his wife, Verity Thom, also a psychologist, run a relationship and sex therapy practice together and have shared practical advice for New Zealand couples in their Herald column over the past several years.

Drawing on his years of experience counselling couples, Beets wrote the book in response to the “crying need for good, practical help with relationships”, he told the Herald at the time.

He tackles common problems such as partner blaming, criticism, negative behaviour, and insecurities, and shares practical advice for couples, married or otherwise, who are facing struggles in their relationships.

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