But You Seemed So Happy

Book excerpt: In this tender, funny, and sharp memoir-in-essays, the author of Amateur Hour examines marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss & longing shape a life. Six weeks after she and her husband announced their divorce, Kimberly Harrington began work on a book that she thought would be about divorce, full of dark humor and a not-small amount of annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage, they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through how she had formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce. And she dug back into the history of her marriage—how she and her future ex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they changed, the impact that having children had on their relationship, and what they still owed each other. But You Seemed So Happy is an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to its slowly coming apart, and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir-in-essays is an irreverent act of forgiveness—of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold a permanent place in our lives. “An honest, tender, and often hilarious book on the end of a modern marriage. No matter your relationship status, But You Seemed So Happy begs the question, What are we all doing here? I laughed, I cried, I found myself in the pages over and over again.” —Kate Baer, New York Times–bestselling author of What Kind of Woman: Poems “Intimate and raw yet meticulously scrubbed of the slightest tinge of self-pity, Harrington explores the pain and intricacies of a marriage and its dissolution with a ruthless, unflinching honest and gallows humor that makes you feel like you buried a body with her.” —Emily Flake, cartoonist for The New Yorker