Marriage: A Duet - Couverture souple

Now available in paperback: "Eloquent and earthy . . . this duet is worth contemplating." (Philadelphia Inquirer)

In the first novella, A Married Woman, Caroline Betts keeps a careful vigil over her husband's deathbed. For 40 years, she had been a devoted wife. But during one awful moment in their otherwise good marriage, her husband William was in love with someone else. At the end of William's life, Caroline confronts her sorrow, anger, and odd flashes of relief and feelings of rebirth.

In the second novella, A Married Man, David -- husband, father, businessman -- finds his sense of well-being and achievement undermined by the betrayal of his wife, who's had a brief affair. The novella takes readers inside the couple's heartbreaking efforts to reclaim their marriage. Elegantly written, profoundly affecting, and subtly illuminating, Fleming's fiction debut is a revelation.

How is a woman supposed to act at the bedside of her husband in a coma? Caroline's son points out that dyeing her hair, right there in the hospital, is a weird choice. Caroline is also re-living the one perilous point in her marriage, when it seemed possible her husband might defect - to a beautiful friend of their daughter's. Mediocre marriages weren't in such jeopardy. Meanwhile, in the age of the uncommitted male, David Sanderson's wife has been unfaithful and he minds like hell. Counsellors offer him workshops, Prozac and Viagra. His wife offers slinky undies instead of the cotton ones he loves. Why won't anyone accept that he's not depressed...he's heartbroken? Anne Taylor Fleming's witty and captivating portrait of spouses in crisis challenges the ways we look at marriage today.