‘Love makes a place in your life, it makes a place for itself in your bed. Invisibly, it makes a place in your body, rerouting all your blood vessels, throbbing right alongside your heart. When it’s gone, nothing is whole again.’
I have been longing to read this book for years ever since it first came out in 2018. I kept hoping someone would get me the book as a gift or that my mum would get herself a copy then I’d just borrow it then I gave up until six years later… my mother eventually did get a copy and handed it off to me and I finally got to read Tayari Jones’ ‘An American Marriage’ – and what a treat of a book it was!
Hello, my fellow bookworms? Did I say hi? Not yet? Apologies – of late a lot of people have been commenting on the fact that I don’t remember to actually greet them first, I just get right into it. My bad.
Now that the niceties are out of the way, let’s talk about the twisted tale of An American Marriage that has been told so beautifully by Ms Jones. This is a love story, well a love triangle story that revolves around three people – Roy, Celestial and Andre. Celestial and Andre are childhood friends whose friendship has spanned decades while Roy and Celestial are two adults who met through Andre and fell in love, got married and then everything came crashing down months later… Roy caught himself doing the right thing at the wrong time and was falsely accused of a heinous crime he did not commit. Unfortunately being a black man in Atlanta, Georgia back in the day means everything is blamed on you despite your innocence.
Roy ends up in prison for the foreseeable future and Celestial is left home alone as a newlywed but essentially a single woman with a husband in jail and a best friend who supports all her efforts to fight for said husband’s freedom. This love triangle trope of the best friend and the partner isn’t something new and is still very common to this day but the way Jones portrays this story is so intricate, so moving and so vivid – you can feel every emotion, see every tear shed and at some point you can’t decide who deserves Celestial more – Roy or Andre?
Using such sharp vivid language that lingers, in equal measure, on ugliness and beauty, violence and intimacy, Jones explores the effects of a wrongful conviction on a young black couple in a haunting, compelling and deeply humane work of fiction. Much of the story is told through the letters Roy and Celestial send each other during his incarceration. There is something uncomfortably voyeuristic in the experience of reading, as we witness the fine grains of Roy and Celestial’s marriage begin to course between their fingers. As the long year begins to stretch both of them thin. They are left waiting, trapped and uncertain, on the borders of an as-yet-uncharted future looming out of the fog. After five years of purgatory, Roy is acquitted, but freedom has never tasted so much like ashes. Something has been lost in the long gulf of Roy and Celestial’s separation, something irretrievable, something neither of them is sure they wanted back.
I must admit the letters got a bit much for me to some degree. I think it’s because it felt like the story was dragging along quite slowly until the pace picked up closer to the end when Roy is finally free (also not forgetting the fact that he met somebody quite special to him in that prison – I won’t spoil it for you)… I ate up the few last chapters like I would an episode of Grey’s Anatomy! The drama, the intrigue, the scandal, the fight for the one you love! Honestly… the fight scene was one of the more memorable parts of this book, shout-out to Big Roy, those who know… know.
An American Marriage is a luminous, viscerally potent exploration of a very difficult marriage between two complicated people who are exhausted from their own efforts to become something more than a consequence, and who are most married where it counted most: in the horrors they have shared. It is a searing portrait of the ragged ways we fall in and out of love. Jones is such a talented writer, and you actually feel the same dilemmas faced by her characters. She has such an ear for dialogue, for capturing emotion, and for showing how our relationships can both make us feel safe and make us come undone. I highly recommend it and now understand what all the hype was about when Oprah endorsed it back in 2018.
Ona nother note, I’m losing my own reading challenge this year, bummer! I was on track for a while then October happened and #SimbaMbili23 happened and it is now December 12th and I’m behind by four books. I can’t even try to catch up in the T minus 19 days left of 2023. We’ll do better next year… inshallah. How are you guys doing with your reading goals this year? Hopefully better than me:)
Ratings: 8/10
Writers Haven 