349. An American Marriage
Rating: ☆☆☆☆
Recommended by:
Author: Tayari Jones
Genre: Fiction
308 pages, published February 6, 2018
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
African American newlyweds Celestial and Roy, an aspiring artist and a young executive, are living the American Dream in Atlanta when Roy is wrongly accused and convicted of rape. How they navigate the ensuing years is the subject of this book.
Quotes
“But home isn’t where you land; home is where you launch. You can’t pick your home any more than you can choose your family. In poker, you get five cards. Three of them you can swap out, but two are yours to keep: family and native land.”
“There should be a word for this, the way it feels to steal something that’s already yours.”
“A woman doesn’t always have a choice, not in a meaningful way. Sometimes there is a debt that must be paid, a comfort that she is obliged to provide, a safe passage that must be secured. Everyone of us has lain down for a reason that was not love.”
“There are too many loose ends in the world in need of knots.”
“I’m alone in a way that’s more than the fact that I am the only living person within these walls. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn’t possible. Maybe that’s what innocence is, having no way to predict the pain of the future. When something happens that eclipses the imaginable, it changes a person. It’s like the difference between a raw egg and a scrambled egg. It’s the same thing, but it’s not the same at all. That’s the best way I can put it. I look in the mirror and I know it’s me, but I can’t quite recognize myself.”
“Marriage is between two people. There is no studio audience.”
“I thought of Walter again. “Six or twelve,” he sometimes said when he was depressed, which wasn’t all the time but often enough that I recognized a blue mood when it was settling in. “That’s your fate as a black man. Carried by six or judged by twelve.”
“Much of life is timing and circumstance, I see that now.”
“I have always let you know how much I care, right? You never had to wonder. I’m not a man for words. Daddy showed me that you ‘do’ for a woman. Remember that time when you damn near had a nervous breakdown because it looked like the hickory-nut tree in the front yard was thinking about dying? Where I’m from, we don’t believe in spending money on pets, let alone trees. But I couldn’t bear to see you fret, so I hired a tree doctor. See, in my mind, that was a love letter.”
“Sometimes when you like where you end up, you don’t care how you got there.”
“You can never really unlove somebody. Maybe it changes shape, but it’s there.”
“Sometimes it’s exhausting for me to simply walk into the house. I try and calm myself, remember that I’ve lived alone before. Sleeping by myself didn’t kill me then and will not kill me now. But this what loss has taught me of love. Our house isn’t simply empty, our home has been emptied. Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.”
My Take
Tayari Jones is a gifted writer and I appreciated the insight that she provided into the lives of people who are typically outside my social circles. After reading An American Marriage, I felt that I had a better understanding of the African American communities and the issues that they have to contend with, especially African American men. I was also impressed with the understanding Jones conveys of how a marriage works or doesn’t work.
