Calhoun offers marital anecdotes rich with the alternating warmth and pathos that typify a long-lasting union…

"Last book that made you laugh? Ada Calhoun’s Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give. I mean, underlining and yellow marker bust-out laughs."— Tom Hanks New York Times Book Review

"A fine gift to tuck between negligees and garter belts at the more literary bride’s shower. A breezy, warm-hearted meditation on the nature of matrimony.… [Calhoun’s] wry, likable voice is at its Ephronesque best."— Lisa Zeidner Washington Post

"Raise a glass to these reality-check essays that are equal parts ode to marriage… and sly acknowledgment of its challenges."— O, The Oprah Magazine

"By turns funny, melancholy, and profound. A thoughtful read of the monogamous, non-monogamous, and every relationship iteration in between."— New York

"[Calhoun’s] witty, enthusiastic, emotional, and hard-headed reflections ought to be required reading for anyone entering, experiencing, leaving or avoiding marriage."— Jonathan Sale Guardian

"Light and funny… original, engrossing."— Heather Havrilesky New York Times Book Review

"Ada Calhoun has written the definitive meditation on marriage in all of its mystery and imperfection. It should be required reading for anyone considering it, and highly recommended for those who want to be reminded of why they did it in the first place."— Molly Ringwald

"By turns hilariously candid, thought-provoking, and romantic, Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give gave me a richer view of the joys and challenges of marriage—especially my own marriage."— Gretchen Rubin, New York Times best-selling author of The Happiness Project

"A warm, tart, corrective to the persistent conviction that a wedding is the neat end of a love story."— Rebecca Traister, New York Times best-selling author of All the Single Ladies

"Ada Calhoun is the friend we all need—the one who lets us behind the curtain of her good marriage to help us better understand our own. She’s smart, funny, and, best of all, willing to bare all."— Emma Straub, New York Times best-selling author of Modern Lovers

2017-02-07
True love never runs smooth according to these essays, which could pass as a memoir of the author's own marriage.Calhoun made her well-received debut with St. Marks Is Dead (2015), an impressive volume of journalistic research that blended the historical with the personal. This is a slighter work, though not the sort that rock critics would call a sophomore slump. Title aside, this will resonate most strongly not with those about to get married but with those who have been married awhile, even happily so, but who deal with the sort of struggles and tensions that all married couples do. After a fight with her husband, when Calhoun asked her mother the key to staying married, she received the reply: " ‘You don't get divorced.' At the time, I thought her response flip, but now I consider it wise." A long-married woman told her, " ‘the first twenty years are the hardest'….At the time I thought she was joking. She was not." Having yet to hit the 20-year mark in a marriage that appears stable, the author approaches her subject not as the voice of wisdom and experience but as someone in the same trenches who can comfort her married readers that they are not alone. She still feels (and occasionally submits to) strong attractions to the opposite gender, and she resents it when her husband does as well. When she writes of a book-tour encounter, "we'd made out, but not too much—unless you think that anything when you're married to someone else is too much, in which case this was definitely way too much," readers may wonder about Calhoun's maturity. But she's engaging and all-too-human, chronicling the strains of being together, being apart, sharing a rental car, screwing up finances, raising a son, and somehow staying together in spite of (and maybe because of) it all. Calhoun ends with a toast that she actually would give, and it's wise and lovely.