Falling: The Story of One Marriage

"While it requires will to make a marriage work, it also requires a horrifying act of will to bring one to an end," observes John Taylor in this beautifully written and emotionally haunting memoir. With searing insight and intensity, Taylor chronicles the demise of his eleven-year marriage?and the journey he made in order to put the failure of "making it work" behind him.

In an unflinchingly honest narrative that at last gives voice to a man?s feelings on the pain of divorce, Taylor describes the hopeful beginnings of his marriage and its gradual disintegration. He wrestles with the decision to leave his wife and young daughter, struggles to clarify his responsibilities as a husband and father, and explores the idea of moral self-definition and imperfection while learning that even the most intimate choices have far-reaching consequences.

As many readers will discover, it is equally difficult for a man to walk away from a marriage as it is for a woman. For anyone who has ever been touched by divorce, Falling will be a profound and heartwrenching reading experience.

"Marriage doesn't just break down," observes Taylor, a distinguished ex-Esquire writer. "We disconnect the life support." To list the Taylors' problems scarcely does justice to his thoughtful account of their doomed 11-year marriage: age difference (he was 26; she, 32), her Parkinson's disease, her alienation after forsaking a writing career for motherhood, his adultery, his panicky consideration of "the Belize option" (if you flee with your assets to dodge alimony, Belize won't extradite).

Mr. and Mrs. Taylor's lovers are vividly sketched. Alex, the most rounded extramarital character, survived a Marseilles orgy ending in a death by coke overdose and became a successful businesswoman bent on marrying Taylor, but wound up with only one steady relationship--with her therapist. The author gets the fullest portrait here. A childhood bouncing around the world from Accra, Ghana, to Yokosuka, Japan, may have predisposed him to domestic change, and his big-headed, big-town milieu was rife with divorce (the wife of Taylor's dad's close friend phoned from a billionaire's jet to say she was taking off with the billionaire--who had been their best man). Taylor skillfully interweaves others' sad tales with his own and with historical evidence from the classic Family, Sex, and Marriage in England 1500-1800. He doesn't solve the quintessential questions, but sheds both warmth and light on the whole emotional roller coaster. And the romantic tunes his wife introduced him to (Songs of the Auvergne and Tous les matins du monde) won't ever stop plucking his heartstrings. --Tim Appelo