This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage Read Online Free PDF

all the tags had been filled out with VanDevender in advance so that you could just print your first name on the top and get your lemonade. On that table was a towering assortment of wildflowers stuck into a clear glass vase. “Does everyone have one great floral arrangement in them?” I asked her.
    â€œNo,” she said.
    I remember that her gray hair was thick and cropped short and that she looked at me directly, not glancing over at the flowers.
    â€œOne algebraic proof?”
    She shook her head.
    â€œOne Hail Mary pass? One five-minute mile?”
    â€œOne great novel,” she said.
    â€œBut why a novel?” I asked, having lost for the moment the good sense to let it go. “Why a great one?”
    â€œBecause we each have the story of our life to tell,” she said. It was her trump card, her indisputable piece of evidence. She took my silence as a confirmation of victory and so I was able to excuse myself. I found my husband and begged him to get me out of there.
    But I couldn’t stop thinking about this woman, not later that same day, not five years later. Was it possible that, in everybody’s lymph system, a nascent novel is knocking around? A few errant cells that, if given the proper encouragement, cigarettes and gin, the requisite number of bad affairs, could turn into something serious? Living a life is not the same as writing a book, and it got me thinking about the relationship between what we know and what we can put on paper. For me it’s like this: I make up a novel in my head (there will be more about this later). This is the happiest time in the arc of my writing process. The book is my invisible friend, omnipresent, evolving, thrilling. During the months (or years) it takes me to put my ideas together, I don’t take notes or make outlines; I’m figuring things out, and all the while the book makes a breeze around my head like an oversized butterfly whose wings were cut from the rose window in Notre Dame. This book I have not yet written one word of is a thing of indescribable beauty, unpredictable in its patterns, piercing in its color, so wild and loyal in its nature that my love for this book, and my faith in it as I track its lazy flight, is the single perfect joy in my life. It is the greatest novel in the history of literature, and I have thought it up, and all I have to do is put it down on paper and then everyone can see this beauty that I see.
    And so I do. When I can’t think of another stall, when putting it off has actually become more painful than doing it, I reach up and pluck the butterfly from the air. I take it from the region of my head and I press it down against my desk, and there, with my own hand, I kill it. It’s not that I want to kill it, but it’s the only way I can get something that is so three-dimensional onto the flat page. Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book.
    When I tell this story in front of an audience it tends to get a laugh. People think I’m being charmingly self-deprecating, when really it is the closest thing to the truth about my writing process that I know. The journey from the head to hand is perilous and lined with bodies. It is the road on which nearly everyone who wants to write—and many of the people who do write—get lost. So maybe Mrs. X. VanDevender in the Preston, Mississippi, Masonic Lodge was right; maybe everyone does have a novel in them, perhaps even a great one. I don’t believe it, but for the purposes of this argument let’s say it’s so. Only a few of us are going to be willing to break our own hearts by trading in the living beauty of