Harrison Scott Key is a professional memoirist. Readers watch his life move along from book to book. His first tells of growing up in rural Mississippi with a stern father who wanted him to be a “regular” boy—interested in football, hunting and fishing. Key was not that boy. He would eventually earn a PhD and become a college professor. His recalling of that childhood, “The World’s Largest Man,” was a huge success, a bestseller, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and put him on a grueling, extensive promotion tour around America.
His second book is essentially about that tour and the difficult and absurd situations an author must cope with moving from city to city, bookstore to bookstore for months. In both books Key discusses his powerful drive to be a successful author. He writes daily, relentlessly, and he likes to write in Waffle Houses and coffee shops, not at home.
“How to Stay Married,” his third installment, continues the biographical story but opens with a shocking surprise. Key’s wife suddenly announces to him she wants a divorce, is in love with a neighbor, his friend, and has been for quite some time. Key is shocked, surprised, horrified. There are options: let her go, and accept shared custody of the children or allow a kind of feral self to take command and beat or shoot her; or try to figure out what happened and somehow save the marriage.
He consults the pastor of a large mainstream Protestant church who suggests threatening his wife with shaming and shunning and excommunication as if Savannah, Georgia were a medieval village. He finds real wisdom and comfort in a small, new church group and he moves towards forgiveness, but first he must understand what part of the problem was his fault. Where did communication break down? Was he absent, negligent, distant? How did he fail to notice the absence of intimacy? He comes to understand the effects of earlier trauma on his wife—her pastor father deserted the family; her mother died of cancer just days before her wedding.
And, for Key, understanding his life can come only through writing honestly about it. He is, as mentioned, a humorist, and there are plenty of wry, ironic witticisms in this story—adultery humor—but he is also, it seems, an artist of human suffering. “In addition to going insane you will feel pain that transcends all prior experience. Pain that burns away the sky.” That is just the start of it. The whole process, incredibly, takes about five years. Most of his friends finally tell him to give up, let her go, but he does not, and they are, today, a couple that has an excellent chance of growing old together.
