Table of Contents: I Married You For Happiness

Author: Lily Tuck
Publisher/Year: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2011
Synopsis: Slender, potent, and utterly engaging, I Married You For Happiness combines marriage, mathematics, and the probability of an afterlife to create Tuck's most affecting and riveting book yet.

“His hand is growing cold, still she holds it” is how this novel that tells the story of a marriage begins. The tale unfolds over a single night as Nina sits at the bedside of her husband, Philip, whose sudden and unexpected death is the reason for her lonely vigil. Still too shocked to grieve, she lets herself remember the defining moments of their long union, beginning with their meeting in Paris. She is an artist, he a highly accomplished mathematician—a collision of two different worlds that merged to form an intricate and passionate love. As we move through select memories—real and imagined—Tuck reveals the most private intimacies, dark secrets, and overwhelming joys that defined Nina and Philip's life together.

Reviews:
The New York Times
"In this writing — purposefully fragmented, and composed with frugal economy — the characters verge toward the schematic, and the present tense in which the novel is couched increases the illusion of something light and fugitive."

Kirkus Reviews
"Here Tuck suspends time, allowing Nina, during the night ahead, to sift through the memories and images from their life together."

The Seattle Times
"In this view of marriage, set against beguiling backdrops from France to Hong Kong and placing the couple firmly within a sophisticated set, the alchemy of opposites is neither good nor bad. It's simply the stuff of which the relationship is made."

PopMatters
"Her ability to work mathematical concepts into a literary novel is impressive, as is the way numbers are pitted against life’s grayer areas, which defy quantifying."

The Washington Post
"Her new novel, as a result, is messy, reckless — a gasping and hurried labor — but imbued with enough heart that anyone who makes it past the first confounding pages will elbow ahead, trying to breathe life into the corpse."