After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Other books by Taylor Jenkins Reid:

One True Loves

Daisy Jones & The Six

Malibu Rising

Carrie Soto is Back

In After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid, Lauren and Ryan's marriage is on the rocks. After she throws a vase at him one night (!), they decide on a separation for one year while they decide if their marriage is worth working at. Lauren stays in the house with Thumper, the dog, and Ryan is in an apartment by himself. They start dating other people, but they're also writing each other emails and saving them as drafts and they're each reading the other person's draft emails. Meanwhile, Lauren's brother is getting married, her grandmother is old, real old, and her mom is dating some guy named Bill.

I have mentioned here before that I do not like to read books about marriages in peril. It should come as no surprise to you that I was not pumped to learn this was a book about a relationship on the edge. I wasn't especially pleased when the main character committed an act of violence on page 58 (throwing a vase! with a pet in the house!). I wasn't really in the mood for delving into grumpiness over sex, food, and finances. 

But.

You guys. It's TJR, you know? 

It was so good. Lauren spends the year wandering around asking for relationship advice. She hears everything from marriage is boring and boring is good to maybe I don't want/need a relationship to suck it up and do the hard work of marriage to the best part of any relationship is falling in love and then you need to get out of dodge. She spends the year discovering new things about herself and her relationships outside of her romantic relationship. She reflects on what she could have done better with her marriage. She puts in real work.

And what does TJR really do well that I always talk about even in her meh-est of books? She's so generous in her writing of women characters and their friendships. There's something so refreshing about how many female friends Lauren has and how much they love her and she loves them and it's all open and honest and just something that gets brushed aside in many books these days. I deeply appreciate how glowingly TJR writes about women. 

And sure I thought the ending was a little bit of a cheat, but I also wanted that to be the ending. 

4/5 stars (but domestic violence is bad - don't throw things at people, okay, even if you're mad)

Lines of note:

"...If you stay married for a number of years and you have a happy time together and then you decide you don't want to be married anymore and you choose to go be happy with someone else or doing something else, that's not a failure. That's just life." (page 125)

I feel like there was a famous person (Dan Savage, maybe?) who once said that marriage should be a limited-contract like for five or seven years and you have to reevaluate and update your contract regularly. That way, if you grow apart or you each want to move to different continents, it can be done easily. The time you do spend together isn't a waste, it should be celebrated, but you can move on when you need to move on. I just kept thinking about this. Divorce isn't failure, it's just the end of a contract.

I always think of my grandmother as my grandmother. I never think about the fact that she is my mother's mother. My mom isn't at the top of the totem pole, which is what it often feels like. Rather, she's just one piece of a long line of women. (page 197)

We recently asked my niece who her mom's brothers and sister were. She honestly had no idea. We are her aunts and uncles and she doesn't know who is blood related and who is related by marriage. My sister once began a sentence with "my dad did..." to me and I was so puzzled because he was my dad, too? But to her he's was her dad. I don't know. This passage just sort of sent me down a rabbit hole. 

"I don't want to have kids," Rachel says..."I love kids. I'm excited for Charlie's kid. I'm excited for when you have kids. But you know? I just haven't ever felt that longing to have my own. I look at new moms sometimes, and I immediately feel stressed out for them. I saw this family the other day at the mall. It was these two parents and then these two kids. The boy was a teenager, the girl was maybe ten, and I just...I felt this very clear sense of "I don't want that."" (page 227)

Look at TJR giving us childfree by choice women an actual voice in literature, even though it was immediately followed by someone telling her she would change her mind. I mean, that is what would happen.

"...If Bill lives with me, he stops being this person I can't wait to see, and he becomes the man who leave his dirty dishes in the sink." (page 236)

Truer words have never been spoken.