There's no shortage of books out there about marriage and many of them paint a rosy picture of happy couples in wedded bliss. But that’s not Heather Havrilesky’s take. The journalist has written her own memoir on the subject, “Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage,” where she confesses that she “hates” her husband of 16 years.
The 51-year-old, who writes the “Ask Polly” advice column, tied the knot with her husband, Bill, in 2006 and they share two daughters. In her new book, she compares her spouse to “a pointy Lego brick underfoot,” “a smelly heap of laundry” and a “snoring heap of meat.” With revelations like these, you might think they’re headed for a split, but Havrilesky says she has no plans to divorce him.
So what inspired her to get real about her marriage in such a public way? “The reason I wrote the book in the first place is in our culture we love to tell stories about falling in love,” the author explains. “There are a lot less stories and books and movies about actually making a relationship work over the long haul.” Havrilesky says she hopes her book is a “refreshing antidote to the carefully curated glimpses of people’s lives” we see on social media where everything looks perfect.
And despite what she writes in the book, her union with Bill seems rock solid and she calls him “my best friend, my therapist and my mother in one.”