Peggy Rambach faced an enormous difficulty in trying to write a book about her disasterous marriage to Andre Dubus: how to maintain authorial distance. The approach she finally took will leave many readers frustrated--especially those who actually knew the real persons behind the fictional masks. The need to disguise who, what and where also makes it difficult to understand what is going on. The book is very elliptical--a series of narrative riffs that raise issues and then leave them forever dangling. The style, which employs a large number of sentence fragments, varies widely in tone, indicating that the book was composed over a long period of time in bits and pieces, in highly diverse states of mind. The most vivid (and quite humorous) parts are the ones satirically critical of Dubus's idiosyncratic personality and habits, which clearly drove her nuts. One cannot imagine a less compatible couple. Dubus was a charismatic character with a gift for performance--but no woman should ever have been foolish enough to marry him. If that's the theme of this book, then it was brilliantly done.

This is a captivating story of a courtship and marriage covering the spectrum, from deep love to gratuitous cruelty. The genuineness of the characters is not just a function of an old saw that this book is based on the author's own marriage. Any diary can make that claim. The genuineness is more the result of Rambach's extraordinary talent, as an observer, as a listener and as a prose stylist. She does not waste one word. Rambach can at one moment take your breath away, and at another moment make you laugh out loud (see Chapter 14). My only complaint is that she did not write more. Oh well, I will keep a close eye out for Rambach's next book.