Vessels: A Love Story

by Daniel Raeburn

Overview

An unforgettable portrait of a marriage tested to its limits.

When Dan, a writer with a passion for underground comics, and his wife Bekah, a potter dedicated to traditional Japanese ceramics, met through a mutual friend, they swiftly fell in love. “Of all the women I’ve ever met,” Dan told a friend, “she’s the first one who felt like family.” But at Christmas, as they prepared for the birth of their first child, tragedy struck.

Based on Daniel Raeburn’s acclaimed New Yorker essay, Vessels: A Love Story is the story of how he and Bekah clashed and clung to each other through a series of unsuccessful pregnancies before finally, joyfully, becoming parents. In prose as handsomely unadorned as his wife’s pottery, Raeburn recounts a marriage cemented by the same events that nearly broke it.

Vessels is an unflinching, enormously moving account of intimacy, endurance, and love.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393285383
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	03/14/2016
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	854,319
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Daniel Raeburn’s writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, and The Imp, his series of booklets about underground cartoonists. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the National Endowment for the Arts. He and his wife and two daughters live in Chicago, where he teaches nonfiction writing at the University of Chicago.

Editorial Reviews

01/11/2016
Marriage can be rife with challenges even in the best of times, but when a relationship is beset by tragedy, as Raeburn (a writer and teacher at the University of Chicago) recounts in this affecting and often wrenching memoir, that is when vows and bonds are truly tested. Raeburn, at loose ends professionally and personally, meets Bekah, a potter, at a party, and they have an instant connection. But Raeburn endured his parent’s shattering divorce and wants nothing to do with marriage or kids. Bekah, also a bit lost after experiencing artistic success, makes the first move. After they get engaged, Raeburn is still fighting his lingering reluctance when Bekah learns she’s pregnant, but ultimately miscarries. When she gets pregnant again, she discovers she has a thyroid condition and placenta abruptia, placing her chances of carrying to term at 50/50. The baby, Irene, is stillborn, but Bekah goes through the labor because her midwife explains it will improve her chances of giving birth later on. They’re haunted by Irene, keeping her ashes in a vase Bekah made. They go to a support group, bury themselves in work, take note of which friends and relatives say and do nothing while they grieve, and mark Irene’s almost birthdays. Raeburn writes palpably of loss and anguish, but also shows how love, hope, and resilience triumph over despair. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"More than offering a simple tale about grief and the struggles of parenthood, Raeburn speaks to the emotional influence of those we try to bring into the world and the lives we are responsible for."

Booklist

"Daniel Raeburn writes like a person who means it, every last word. Vessels is spare and elegant and smart and propulsive, but above all it feels unrelentingly truthful, alive with the close breath of the realest intimacy. Raeburn went to a very dark place and brought us back something beautiful and strangely consoling."

Claire Dederer

"Vessels should be in the company of memoirs such as Darkness Visible by William Styron, about depression. Both are books that speak to one issue, yet find the thread that connects us all."

babycenter.com - Tara Shafer

"This is one of the wisest, saddest, most beautiful books about love that I’ve ever read."

Tom Bissell

"Vessels is a brilliant and dazzling story about love, marriage, and family. In a prose so transparent that you feel as if it’s your own experience, Daniel Raeburn has written a beautiful book about loss and redemption."

Susan Cheever

"Daniel Raeburn gets right down to the essentials: life, death, love, loss. There’s not a spare syllable here, and the telegraphic style has the odd effect of amplifying these profound questions, allowing them to resonate fully. Vessels is a beautiful book about the sheer, mysterious contingency of anyone being born at all."

Alison Bechdel

"One of the most beautifully sad and mesmerizing books of the year."

“Best Nonfiction of 2016” Minnesota Public Radio

2015-12-10
A University of Chicago creative writing instructor's account of the near-marriage-ending heartbreak he and his wife suffered as they struggled to have children.When Raeburn first met his wife, Bekah, a potter, she immediately "felt like family." But a shadow loomed over their relationship. Before they married, Bekah miscarried one child; later, she gave birth to a dead child they named Irene, whose cremated remains the pair kept in one of Bekah's handmade jars. Both felt profound rage and grief, which they took out on each other and, sometimes, on themselves. To the author, Bekah's pained pessimism seemed to hint at feelings that she was a monstrous mother "who'd rejected her child." Haunted by their failures, they continued to try for more children. They finally succeeded when Rebekah gave birth via cesarean section to a healthy daughter. Yet even in the midst of personal happiness, Raeburn was still deeply troubled over the loss of his first child. Irene had become an absent presence that reminded them of the deaths that had not only occurred within the family but, like the suicide of a beloved painter-friend, had also occurred outside of it. Meanwhile, Bekah became pregnant again only to miscarry. And while the family seemed to grow closer, Raeburn could begin to see the cracks emerge in the relationship with his wife. It was as though they were sacrificing "the marriage that had made [Irene]…by re-creat[ing] the [dysfunctional] ones that had made us." At forty, Bekah finally gave birth to another daughter, which, though a joyful event, tested the bonds within the family even more. Yet in the end, the "vessel" of the Raeburns' marriage held, "cemented" by bonds forged through blood, loss, and hope. The narrative is not only a poignant expression of how two young people matured as they created a family. It is also a celebration of the way that birth—even if that birth ends in sudden death—brings new life to parents. An eloquently candid memoir.

Kirkus Reviews