Readers Guide, courtesy of Overlook Press
It’s April of 2007, the day Carmen’s husband, Jobe, dies. And she’s elated. Carmen never loved Jobe. Drawn as a young woman by his family’s wealth and his mother’s warmth, she married him simply because she didn’t know what else to do. The Forever Marriage shifts between Carmen’s life as a widow and her early years as a college student, wife and mother, illuminating slowly the complicated relationship she had with her eccentric but fine mathematician husband—where and how it went so terribly wrong. This novel is at its heart a mystery, and the mystery is what, exactly, the nature of Carmen and Jobe’s marriage might have been. The Forever Marriage is about desire, regret and loss. It merits comparison to the best work of Anne Tyler, Sue Miller, Alice Sebold and Elizabeth Berg.
“From hotel trysts to chemo sessions, Bauer connects everyday life to the unexpected wars between body and psyche. Her heroine’s blithe and convincing allure, and Bauer’s natural wit and lyric storytelling, give this novel of hard-won transformations an unforgettable force.” –Maria Flook, author of the New York Times bestseller Invisible Eden: A Story of Love and Murder on Cape Cod