The harrowing and beautiful story of the first year of the author's second marriage. In a plainspoken, emotionally accessible voice that readers have not heard from him before, Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm , Hotels of North America, and other fictions, and of The Black Veil , a prize-winning previous memoir, lays bare, in an eventful month-by-month account, the first year of his second marriage. At this story's start, Moody is, by his own description, "a balding middle-aged recovering alcoholic and sexual compulsive with a history of depression who wrote a novel that people liked in the 90s." He is also the newly divorced father of a beloved little girl and a man in love, whose answer to the question "Would you like to be in a committed relationship?" is, fully and for the first time, "Yes." And so his second marriage begins as he emerges from the wreckage of his past, humbly and with dearest hopes, only to be battered by a stormy sea of external troubles--robberies, miscarriages, and deaths of friends, just for starters. As Moody puts it, this is "a story in which a lot of bad luck is the daily fare of the protagonists, but in which they are also in love." To Moody's astonishment, matrimony is the site of strength in hard times, a vessel infinitely tougher and more durable than any boat these two participants would have traveled by alone. Love buoys this couple, lifting them above their hardships, and the reader is buoyed along with them.