What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver

This intimate memoir of youth, marriage and literary ambition "presents powerful testimony to the dark side of both creativity and working-class life" (Booklist).

Maryann Burk Carver met Raymond Carver in 1955, when she was fifteen years old and he was seventeen. In What It Used to Be Like, she recounts a tale of young love and long-distance courtship followed quickly by marriage and two small children.

Over the next twenty-five years, as Carver's fame grew, the family led a nomadic life, mov...