I was lead climbing with AK 2 weeks ago and he asked me, “Have you read the book How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key?”
I said, “Luke Fawcett told me about HSC awhile back, and I devoured two of his memoirs! I especially enjoyed The World’s Largest Man (the memoir about his dad). And right around that same time Jake Blackman told me about Sean Dietrich’s Will the Circle Be Unbroken? (which was excellent), and that led to a couple of Sean’s other books; namely The Incredible Winston Brown.”
AK said, “You should read How to Stay Married.”
“Okay” I said.
3 or 4 minutes later I forgot all about this.
Then, a week ago, ITO (aka Ian Robinson) asked me, “Have you read the book How to Stay Married by Harrison Scott Key?”
“Didn’t you just ask me that last week?” I said.
“Maybe.” Ian said.
So I renewed my audible.com subscription (because the title wasn’t available on Hoopla, AND audible was running a deal for $5.95 per/month for 4 months), and I procured the twice recommended title.
I’m 53m 59s away from the end of the book, AND I highly recommend that you read (or listen) to it!
Here are some excerpts:
“I’d been dumped before. In first grade, a doe-eyed beauty named Shauna cut me loose. She never said why, but she did ask to move desks. In sixth grade, I’d been dumped by a sweet little Southern Baptist with gorgeous brown hair. When I asked why, she quoted a series of Janet Jackson lyrics prepared for this purpose.
‘What have you done for me lately?’ she said, with a snap of her chin, and ran away.
I was blindsided, not by a self-reflection of my flaws, but by the stunning realization that Baptists were allowed to listen to Janet Jackson.”
– Harrison Scott Key, “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told”
“Genesis never disappoints, crammed as it is with nudity, murder, and many delicious set pieces involving nudity and murder, in addition to DIY boatbuilding instructions.”
– Harrison Scott Key, “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told”
“[Jesus] is not cool, his only weapons being the ability to perform mostly food-based miracles and to tell a great story in such a way as to amaze his hearers while also insulting them. He’s slippery.
He says, ‘Love your neighbor.’
Then he’s all ‘You may have to slay your neighbor.”
– Harrison Scott Key, “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told”
PS …here’s an excerpt from a book from that other guy I mentioned above (Sean Dietrich)
“I’ll be honest with you. The variables that construct my existence are confusing. Like handwritten math equations jammed together on a sloppy page of homework. They don’t make any sense. One math problem leads to another, and then another and so it goes.
One day you realize that your life is one whole page of problems and nothing ever gets solved.
One ongoing equation with no equal sign at the end. But it occurred to me, beneath the canopy of a starlight heaven, that I’d been looking at my life all wrong.
It wasn’t a math equation. Things weren’t supposed to add up. There was no solution.
In fact, there was no problem. Life’s variables and numbers and pages of chicken scratch weren’t mathematical marks. They were art. A drawing. An abstract painting. It was meant to be beautiful, not sensical. And embedded within the mess of it all were miracles. Small ones. I’d never paid attention to them because I was too busy, but it didn’t make them less real.”
– Sean Dietrich, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”
This one hit deep: “When I got home from my long drive, I no longer felt terror or shock or even the delightful masculine compulsion to assault the problem with the brute force of reason….
“It was the peace of surrender.
“I no longer felt an obligation to ‘win.’ To win my wife back, to defeat Chad in a lawn-mowing tournament, to prove my worth, to preen my achievements for her review, f*ck it. I couldn’t fix this. I didn’t hardly know what ‘this’ even meant anymore. This is about the weirdest and most terrible feeling a man can have, I think. Conquest of one kind or another – of the self, of others, of danger, of threats, of chaos – this is the spirit that animates our every thought and deed, and when rightly guided, it is this spirit that builds cities and civilizations…. But this bellicose spirit could do no good here. None of the tools and weapons at my disposal worked anymore. So I tendered my resignation from Manly Problem Solvers, Inc., and walked into the house and put away my sword. The meek shall inherit the earth? Cool. Let’s give it a shot.” – Harrison Scott Key, “How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told” (pp. 185-86)