A collection of candid and illuminating break-up stories resulting from three years of interviews by an Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker—“a wonderful and important piece of thinking and reporting” (Elizabeth Gilbert). It all began as a self-help journey in the purest sense. A serial monogamist for more than two decades, Shapiro wanted to know why the honeymoon phase of his relationships never lasted until the actual honeymoon. Believing that you learn more from failure than from success, he spent the next three years criss­crossing the country with a tape recorder, interviewing hundreds of divorced people, hoping to become so fluent in the errors of Eros that he would be able to avoid them in his own love life—and one day be a better husband. The result is a timely treasure trove of marital wisdom that is as racy as it is revelatory. Shockingly intimate and profoundly personal, this is a page-turning, voyeuristic investigation of modern love and a practical guide for any couple looking to beat the roulette-wheel odds of actually staying together forever. “A wonderful and important piece of thinking and reporting.” --Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Committed: A Love Story and Eat, Pray, Love "As a couples therapist, I witness daily the unraveling of adult intimacies. Dana Adam Shapiro's gripping testimonies of demise and divorce are written with vividness and aplomb—I felt as if he were eavesdropping in my office. A grand reportage of marriage and its discontents." --Esther Perel, author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence "A book about divorce written by a man who's never been married should be ridiculous. And yet I gobbled up this odd and touching and delicious book. I read it in a single sitting. And what's more, I learned something new about love and marriage and passion and commitment." --Ayelet Waldman, author of Red Hook Road and Love and Other Impossible Pursuits "After reading Dana Adam Shapiro's fascinating and revealing book, I will never again take my marriage for granted. I would write more, but I have to go buy some scented candles and tidy up the kitchen." --A.J. Jacobs, author of Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection Dana Adam Shapiro directed the Academy Award-nominated documentary Murderball and the Independent Spirit Award nominee Monogamy, starring Chris Messina and Rashida Jones. He is the author of The Every Boy , a former senior editor at Spin , and a contributor to The New York Times Magazine . He lives in Venice, California. You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married) INTRODUCTION My grandma keeps company with spirits. A Dewar’s on the rocks every day at four o’clock on the button, and the spectral kind that rattle around her head. This isn’t some crackpot theory; it’s a matter of fact. They’re here, now, passing through the walls of her old house on Cape Cod, where I’ve come to work on this book. For a long time, I thought it was a book about divorce: a bedside companion for the boo-hoo crowd, Chicken Soup for Shattered Souls. But while I may have set out to interview people about their most brutal breakups, I’m realizing now, almost four years in, that like most marital spats, it’s never about what it’s about. It wasn’t always like this—Grandma’s spirits, I mean—only since my grandpa died, sixteen years ago, a few months shy of their fiftieth wedding anniversary. We talk about it often, this great love of hers, and as we do she sips her scotch, his drink, on her side of their bed. Still, always, on her side of their bed. “To my Howard!” she says, toasting the ghost with his tumbler. That’s what she calls him now, my Howard, sometimes right to his face. It’s a much younger face than I remember, black and white and framed on their bedroom wall. Back when he was here, in color, she always called him “Daddy.” To hear her tell it, she never had eyes for another. It was b’shert, she says—the Yiddish word for “destiny.” They were neighborhood kids from the same side of the tracks of Haverhill, Massachusetts, a factory town that was known back then as Queen Slipper City because local workers manufactured almost 10 percent of the shoes worn in the United States. But the Cinderella subtext wasn’t lost on my grandma Rose, whose name no doubt influenced the tint of her gaze. The first of eight children born to Russian immigrants in 1915, her head has been bumping up against the clouds ever since she could crawl. Where others saw dust, she found glitter, and she came of age air-trumpeting to Cole Porter, daydreaming of a trip to the moon on gossamer wings. And sure enough, as if her destiny had been written in calligraphy, she awoke one day in her teens to find that the love of her life was living just down the road. My Howard. “I got a car when I was sixteen years old, it was a convertible,” she tells me. “And for my first ride, I went out looking for him. I wanted to show off a little. He wa