Here Lies My Heart : Essays on Why We Marry, Why We Don't, and What We Find There

Rating:
Summary: "Advance praise for Here Lies My Heart"
Review: "A bevy of literary writers peer into their heart of hearts to explore every nuance of the sanctified union, including the vows (Cal Fussman), the lies (Louise DeSalvo), the impossibility of it all (Vivian Gornick)." --Publishers Weekly, Spring Roundup

Rating:
Summary: A singularly great collection
Review: A group of brief stories that illuminate just a few of the thousands of facets of relationships -- those sweet or disappointing and everything in between.

Rating:
Summary: Witty and insightful but limited
Review: As with many anthologies of individual experiences, Here Lies My Heart relies on common themes--coping with the routine of a relationship, straying vs. staying, self vs. couple's identity. Overall it hit a negative note. It also overlooked a growing segment of the population--those who have never married and managed to find a degree of contentment. This book wasn't about why people don't marry--it was about how people work through staying in or leaving a marriage.

Rating:
Summary: Head and shoulder above other books in this genre
Review: I've been reading a lot of books about love and relationships in connection with a book I'm working on, and this collections of essays was so superior to the others in the quality of the writing and the honesty and charm of the personal accounts (with a few notable exceptions, including Edward Hoagland's essay) that I made a special effort to post a comment here. This would be an excellent book to give a friend who has a perfectly wonderful marriage that he or she is thinking of walking out on, or to someone who's just experiencing a case of the marriage blahs.

Rating:
Summary: Unfortunately alot of shared experiences but no answers.
Review: In the middle of my almost 27 years of marriage I find myself trying to find answers to unversal questions of Where did the love go?, Should I still hang around here in this marriage etc. It is not all that bad, but is this all there is. I saw alot of myself here and many others. I found no anwers except that what I was feeling and experiencing was not at all uncommon. This did make me feel less guilty about these feelings. I did conclude that these authors had a alot of time to worry about their relationships. Some seemed to be in such a turmoil and I just wanted to say come on shape up and do something.

Rating:
Summary: Intimate, moving, thought-provoking
Review: The stories in this book are lovely. They are sad, moving, deeply thought-out vignettes of various aspects of marriage, married life and/or relationships. The stories probably won't change your life but the reader is afforded an intimate glimpse into the private, often painful and loving world of relationships. I found the writing in many of the stories to be breathtaking.