A Memoir of Falling Back Up, Six Months at a Time
Braided memoir · 80,000 words
Overview
I have married more than two hundred couples, and nearly all of them promise the same thing. I hope. I hope we stay in love. I hope we never lose the spark. It’s lovely. It’s also, if you’ve ever jumped out of a plane, not much of a plan.
My own vows were different, mostly because I came up with them at 10,000 feet, about fifty seconds before I jumped. “I will love you as long as I live.” Easy to say when you think you know exactly how long that is.
At twenty-five, I was given six months. I said my goodbyes, got bored of waiting, and stomped off to have a life instead. Then I kept not dying, and the doctors seemed surprised by my lack of gratitude. So I lived in half-year instalments. I ran away to sea. Changed countries. Fell in love, fell out of love, and jumped out of more airplanes than is strictly advisable. Six months turned out to be the perfect container: long enough to take a ridiculous risk, short enough that nothing got wasted.
Eventually, new tests showed I had never been dying at all. Everyone expected me to be thrilled. Instead I went beige. Without a deadline, I napped, scrolled, and put everything off till later.
Beyond Happily Ever After is the story of how I fell back up, and of the peculiar people who helped. A couple I married inside a pretend video game. Prison inmates who taught me humility. Couples with wildly creative ways of fighting. A British scientist who had chips implanted in his and his wife’s nervous systems so they could try sending each other mental email. Their stories run beside mine, sometimes agreeing with me and sometimes proving me spectacularly wrong.
Like life, it wanders into strange places. It’s funny, a bit messy, and it ends somewhere good: with what forty years of six-month lives taught me about living, and loving someone, when you suddenly have all the time in the world.
The book will appeal to readers drawn to the finite-time questions of Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks and the humour, curiosity and exuberant memoir voice of Susan Orlean’s Joyride.
More stories that didn’t fit between the covers: Beyond the Book →
