Review: A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias

Today in January Magazine’s fiction section, Diane Leach looks at A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias. Says Leach:

Yglesias’s unabashedly autobiographical novel is an homage to his wife, artist Margaret Joskow, who died of bladder cancer in 2004. By turns heartbreaking, amusing, depressing, and joyous, A Happy Marriage is the evocation not only of the couple’s 27 years together, but of Margaret herself, a vibrant, imperfect, loving woman.

The book shifts between the couple’s first three weeks together, with their amusing if agonizing attempts to negotiate dating’s formalities, and their final three weeks of married life, when Margaret, decimated by cancer, is saying her final goodbyes. The contrast of the healthy, beautiful young Margaret and the bald, shivering shadow enduring horrible suffering is a shattering one, made more poignant by Yglesias’s painful attention to detail.

The full review is here.