This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage

A collection of Patchett’s non-fiction, gathered from magazine assignments and essays written across two decades. She writes about the failure of her first marriage and the slow arrival of her second, about her friendship with Lucy Grealy, about opening a bookshop in Nashville, and repeatedly about the unglamorous discipline of writing itself. The pieces were built for different occasions, and hold together because the voice is so steady: plain, exact and unsentimental about hard things.