Yesterday I read A Happy Marriage by Rafael Yglesias, a highly-autobiographical novel about a marriage that ends with his wife’s death from cancer.  I can understand why Ygelsias chose to write this story as a novel; it allows him to get a handle on and control all those aspects of his life that were uncontrollable: wife, sex-life, marriage, career, children, and  the vicious and debilitating and drawn-out assault of cancer on all of those.

Control is a big issue for Yglesias, the fight for it, the loss of it, and the free surrender of it.  Surrounded by controlling wife, parents, and in-laws, in a career dependent on vagaries way beyond his control, and unable to command his own sexual activity, Yglesias , ironically and horribly, only realizes how much he loves his wife when she becomes very ill with cancer and he has to take control of her life. It is a control that will not save her, but it is a control that is proof of his love.  Yglesias comes to understand that so many control issues are expressions of love, manifestations of fear for the safety of the loved one and of unbounded will to protect and preserve.

That Yglesias loved his wife long before he realizes he loves her is evident through the provided history of their courtship and early marriage, scenes that cut back and forth with scenes of her final days and with scenes from later on during rocky periods of the marriage, including an affair, marriage counseling, her period as a painter, and his burgeoning career as a screenwriter. The title of A Happy Marriage is homage to the love that carries the couple through their years together, and not a statement as to the actual levels of happiness experienced.  After all, a happy life, a happy marriage: is any of that really possible?  Ups and downs are part of life, and it is substance of what carries us through and forward and onward that matters.

What is love is the eternal question (second only to what happens after we die), and Yglesias gives a pretty good answer: it is when the life of another person becomes as important to us as our own.  He knows he would do anything to rescue his wife from the misery of cancer, but he cannot, and so he does the best he can, which is to ease her final days and commemorate the life they shared.  He gives up what he cannot control, and he reasserts power over what he can, his power to write.  The result is this moving and honest novel.