This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage was published by HarperCollins in 2013. The collection gathers two decades of Patchett’s essays and journalism — published in The Atlantic, Harper’s, Vogue, The Washington Post, and elsewhere — into a volume that functions as an oblique autobiography. The title essay describes Patchett’s second marriage (to Karl VanDevender, a doctor she has known since childhood) with a directness about domestic happiness that is rarer in American letters than accounts of domestic misery.
The essays range across Patchett’s life: her early struggles as a writer (the essay on writing is among the best craft essays published in the last twenty years), her decision to open an independent bookstore in Nashville (Parnassus Books, founded in 2011 after the city lost its last bookstore), her relationship with her grandmother, her experience of the 2010 Nashville floods, her love for her dog Rose, and her complicated feelings about Los Angeles, where she lived in her twenties. Each essay deploys the same skills that distinguish her fiction: precise observation, emotional honesty without sentimentality, and a structural intelligence that makes even short pieces feel architecturally complete.
The collection reveals the autobiography that underlies Patchett’s fiction without reducing the novels to roman à clef. Readers of Commonwealth will recognize family dynamics; readers of Truth and Beauty will find the essay on friendship illuminating; readers of The Dutch House will see the Philadelphia connections. But the essays stand independently as models of the form.
Collecting This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2013): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$30
- Very good: $8–$15