The Unhappy Marriage Rule

For the New York Times‘s Bookends column, authors Charles McGrath and Leslie Jamison share their thoughts about what they perceive to be the best portrayals of marriage in literature. While McGrath argues that the more interesting literary marriages tend to be unhappy and failing, Jamison explores relationships within Jack Gilbert’s poems, which characterize love “as a state of seeking, rather than having.”

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Jake Slovis is a writer and educator. He holds an MFA in creative writing from Rutgers University-Newark and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at New Jersey Institute of Technology, where he teaches courses focused on visual narrative and composition. His work has appeared in The Millions, Carolina Quarterly, and elsewhere.

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