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Table of Contents
About The Book
In this reverse love story set in Paris and London, which The Wall Street Journal hailed as “funny and soulful…immediately appealing,” a failed monogamist attempts to woo his wife back and to answer the question: Is it really possible to fall back in love with your spouse?
Despite the success of his first solo show in Paris and the support of his brilliant French wife and young daughter, thirty-four-year-old British artist Richard Haddon is too busy mourning the loss of his American mistress to a famous cutlery designer to appreciate his fortune.
But after Richard discovers that a painting he originally made for his wife, Anne—when they were first married and deeply in love—has sold, it shocks him back to reality and he resolves to reinvest wholeheartedly in his family life…just in time for his wife to learn the extent of his affair. Rudderless and remorseful, Richard embarks on a series of misguided attempts to win Anne back while focusing his creative energy on a provocative art piece to prove that he’s still the man she once loved.
Skillfully balancing biting wit with a deep emotional undercurrent, this “charming and engrossing portrait of one man’s midlife crisis” (Elle) creates the perfect picture of an imperfect family—and a heartfelt exploration of marriage, love, and fidelity.
Despite the success of his first solo show in Paris and the support of his brilliant French wife and young daughter, thirty-four-year-old British artist Richard Haddon is too busy mourning the loss of his American mistress to a famous cutlery designer to appreciate his fortune.
But after Richard discovers that a painting he originally made for his wife, Anne—when they were first married and deeply in love—has sold, it shocks him back to reality and he resolves to reinvest wholeheartedly in his family life…just in time for his wife to learn the extent of his affair. Rudderless and remorseful, Richard embarks on a series of misguided attempts to win Anne back while focusing his creative energy on a provocative art piece to prove that he’s still the man she once loved.
Skillfully balancing biting wit with a deep emotional undercurrent, this “charming and engrossing portrait of one man’s midlife crisis” (Elle) creates the perfect picture of an imperfect family—and a heartfelt exploration of marriage, love, and fidelity.
Excerpt
I Am Having So Much Fun Without You
1
MOMENTS OF great import are often tinged with darkness because perversely we yearn to be let down. And so it was that I found myself in late September 2002 at my first solo show in Paris feeling neither proud nor encouraged by the crowds of people who had come out to support my paintings, but saddened. Disappointed. If you had told me ten years ago that I’d be building my artistic reputation on a series of realistic oil paintings of rooms viewed through a keyhole, I would have pointed to my mixed-media collages of driftwood and saw blades and melted plastic ramen packets, the miniature green plastic soldiers I had implanted inside of Bubble Wrap, I would have jacked up the bass on the electronic musician Peaches’ Fancypants Hoodlum album and told you I would never sell out.
And yet here I was, surrounded by thirteen narrative paintings that depicted rooms I had lived in, or in some way experienced with various women over the course of my life, all of these executed with barely visible brushstrokes in a palette of oil colors that would look good on any wall, in any context, in any country. They weren’t contentious, they certainly weren’t political, and they were selling like mad.
Now, my impression that I’d sold out was a private one, shared neither by my gallerist, Julien, happily traipsing about the room affixing red dots to the drywall, nor by the swell of brightly dressed expatriates pushing their way through conversations to knock their plastic glasses of Chablis against mine. There was nothing to be grim about; I was relatively young and this was Paris, and this night was a night that I’d been working toward for some time. But from the minute I’d seen Julien place a red sticker underneath the first painting I’d done in the series, The Blue Bear, I’d been plagued by the feeling that I’d done something irreversible, that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, that I hadn’t been for months. Worse yet, I had no anchor, no one to set me back on course. My wife of seven years, a no-nonsense French lawyer who had stuck by my side in grad school as I showcased found sculptures constructed from other people’s rubbish and dollhouses made out of Barbie Doll packaging, was a meter of my creative decline. Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud was not going to lie and tell me that I’d made it. The person who would have, the one person who I wanted to comfort and reboost me, was across the Channel with a man who was more reliable, easygoing, more available than me. And so it fell to the red stickers and the handshakes of would-be patrons to fuel me with self-worth. But halfway through the evening, with my own wife brightly sparkling in front of everyone but me, I was unmoored and drifting, tempted to sink.
• • •
In the car after the opening, Anne thrust the Peugeot into first gear. Driving stick in Paris is cathartic when she’s anxious. I often let her drive.
Anne strained against her seat belt, reaching out to verify that our daughter was wearing hers.
“You all right, princess?” I asked, turning around also.
Camille smoothed out the billowing layers of the ruffled pink tube skirt she’d picked out for Dad’s big night.
“Non . . .” she said, yawning.
“You didn’t take the last Yop, right?” This was asked of me, by my wife.
The streetlight cut into the car, illuminating the steering wheel, the dusty dashboard, the humming, buzzing electroland of our interior mobile world. Anne had had her hair done. I knew better than to ask, but I recognized the scent of the hairspray that made its metallic strawberry way, twice a month, into our lives.
I looked into her eyes that she had lined beautifully in the nonchalant and yet studied manner of the French. I forced a smile.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Good,” she said, edging the car out of the parking spot. “Cam-Cam, we’ll have a little snack when we get home.”
Paris. Paris at night. Paris at night is a street show of a hundred moments you might have lived. You might have been the couple beneath the streetlamp by the Place de la Concorde, holding out a camera directed at themselves. You might have been the old man on the bridge, staring at the houseboats. You might have been the person that girl was smiling in response to as she crossed that same bridge on her cell phone. Or you might be a man in a shitty French export engaged in a discussion about liquid yogurt with his wife. Paris is a city of a hundred million lights, and sometimes they flicker. Sometimes they go out.
Anne pushed on the radio, set it to the news. The molten contralto of the female announcer filled the silence of our car. “At an opening of a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Tony Blair fully endorsed President Bush’s intention to find and destroy the weapons of mass destruction purportedly hidden in Iraq.” And then the reedy liltings of my once-proud prime minister: “The policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to.”
“Right,” said Anne. “Inaction.”
“It’s madness,” I said, ignoring her pointed phrasing. “People getting scared because they’re told to be. Without asking why.”
Anne flicked on the blinker.
“It’s mostly displacement, I think. Verschiebung.” She tilted her chin up, proud of her arsenal of comp lit terms stored from undergrad. “The big questions are too frightening. You know, where to actually place blame. So they’ve picked an easy target.”
“You think France will go along with it?”
Her eyes darkened. “Never.”
I looked out the window at the endless river below us, dividing the right bank from the left bank, the rich from the richer. “It’s a bad sign, though, Blair joining up,” I added. “I mean, the British? We used to question things to death.”
Anne nodded and fell silent. The announcer went on to summarize the fiscal situation across the Eurozone since the introduction of the euro in January of 2002.
Anne turned down the volume and looked in the rearview mirror. “Cam, honey. Did you have a good time?”
“Um, it was okay,” our daughter, Camille, said, fiddling with her dress. “My favorite is the one with all the bicycles and then the, um, the one in the kitchen, and then the one with the blue bear that used to be in my room.”
I closed my eyes at all the women, even the small ones, who wield words like wands; their phrases sugary and innocuous one minute, corrosive the next.
Aesthetically, The Blue Bear was one of the largest and thus most expensive paintings in the show, but because I had originally painted it as a gift for Anne, it was also the most barbed.
At 117 x 140 cm, The Blue Bear is an oil painting of the guest room in a friend’s rickety, draft-ridden house in Centerville, Cape Cod, where we’d planned to spend the summer after grad school riding out the what-now crests of our midtwenties and to consider baby-making, which—if it wouldn’t answer the “what now?” question—would certainly answer “what next?”
The first among our group of friends to get married, it felt rebellious and artistic to consider having a child while we were still young and thin of limb and riotously in love. We also thought, however, that we were scheming in dreamland, safe beneath the mantra that has been the downfall of so many privileged white people: an unplanned pregnancy can’t happen to us.
Color us surprised, then, when a mere five weeks after having her IUD removed, Anne missed her period and started to notice a distinct throbbing in her breasts. We thought it was funny—so symbiotic were we in our tastes and desires that a mere discussion could push a possibility into being. We were delighted—amused, even. We felt blessed.
During those first few weeks on the Cape, I was still making sculptures out of found objects, and Anne, a gifted illustrator, was interspersing her studies for the European bar with new installments of a zine she’d started while studying abroad in Boston. A play on words with “Anne” (her name) and âne (the French word for “donkey”), Âne in America depicted the missteps of a shy, pessimistic Parisian indoctrinated into the boisterous world of cotton-candy-hearted, light-beer-guzzling Americans who relied on their inexhaustible optimism to see them through all things.
But as the summer inched on and I watched her caress her growing belly as she read laminated hardcovers from the town library, a curious change came over this Englishman who up until that point had been the enemy of sap. I became a sentimentalist, a tenderheart, an easy-listening sop. Much like how the lack of oxygen in planes makes us tear up at the most improbable of romantic comedies, as that child grew within Anne into a living, true-blue thing instead of a discussed possibility, I lost interest in the sea glass and the battered plastic cans and the porous wood I’d been using all summer and was filled with the urge to paint something lovely for her. For them both.
The idea of painting a scene viewed through a keyhole came to me when I happened upon Anne in the bedroom one morning pondering a stuffed teddy bear that our friends, the house’s owners, had left for us on a chair as an early baby gift. They were, at that point, our closest friends and the first people we had told about the pregnancy, but there was something about that stuffed animal that was both touching and foreboding. Would the baby play with it? Would the baby live? I could see the mix of trepidation and excitement playing over Anne’s face as she turned the stuffed brown thing over in her hands, and it comforted me to know that I wasn’t alone with my roller-coaster rides between pridefulness and fear.
And still—Anne is a woman, and I, rather evidently, am not. There was a great difference between what was happening to her and what was potentially happening—going to happen—to us. Which is how I got the idea to approach the scene from a distance, as an outsider, a voyeur.
Except for the tattered rug and the rocking chair beside a window with a view of the gray sea, I left the room uninhabited save for the stuffed bear that I painted seated on the rocking chair, a bit larger than it was in real life, and not at all brown. I painted the bear blue, and not a dim pastel color that might have been a trick of the light and sea, but a vibrating cerulean that lent to the otherwise staid atmosphere a pulsating point of interest. Unsettling in some lights, calming in others—the blue stood for the thrill of the unknown.
When I gave the painting to Anne, she never asked why the bear was blue. She knew why, inherently, and in the giving of the painting, I felt doubly convinced that I loved her, that I truly loved her, that I would love her for all time. What other woman could wordlessly accept such a confession? A tangible depiction of both happiness and fear?
In the fall, that painting traveled with our belongings in a ship across the Atlantic, and it waited in a Parisian storage center until the birth of our daughter, when we finally had a home. We hung it in the nursery, ignoring the comments from certain friends and in-laws that the bear would have been a lot less off-putting and child appropriate if it hadn’t been blue. The very fact that other people didn’t seem to “get it” convinced us that we had a shared sensibility, something truly special, making the painting more important than a private joke.
We continued feeling that way until Camille turned three and started plastering her walls with her own drawings and paper cutouts and origami birds, and we began to feel like we’d enforced something upon her that only meant something to us. So we put it in the basement, intending to scout for a new bookshelf system so that we would have enough wall space to hang the painting in our bedroom. But then I met Lisa, and too much time had passed, and when The Blue Bear was brought up, the discussions were accusatory, spiteful. And so it stayed in the basement, hidden out of sight, not so much forgotten as disdained.
Months later, when I started gathering the paintings for the exhibition, my gallerist said he still remembered the first key painting I’d ever shown him, and that he’d been impressed by it. Might I consider including it in the show? The suspicion that The Blue Bear didn’t mean what it used to mean was confirmed when I told Anne about Julien’s proposition and she said if he thought it made the show more complete somehow, what did she care. Go ahead and listen to him. Sell.
• • •
After finding a parking spot outside of our house in the fourteenth, we moved automatically into our pit-crew positions to execute the life-sustaining gestures of our domestic life. While Anne gave Camille the aforementioned liquid yogurt, I went upstairs to draw her a bath, adding a peach bath ball that she liked. Anne came in to supervise her splashing while I tidied up the kitchen. Then I tucked her in bed and kissed her, and her mother read her a story before lights-out.
In our bathroom, I brushed my teeth quickly and splashed water on my face. Without it ever being stated, I knew well enough to be out before Anne came in so that she could take care of her own needs without having to look up and see the reflection of my face next to hers.
I slipped into bed and waited for the distant sound of singsong reading to fade. When I heard my wife’s footsteps in the hallway, I picked up the book on my nightstand and started to read Poor Fellow My Country, the longest Australian novel of all time.
Anne went into the bathroom, shut me out with a closed door. When she came to bed, she did so smelling of rosemary with her dark hair in a high bun, hair I had been besotted with back in grad school, but now no longer touched. She said good night without looking at me, and I said good night back.
It has been seven months and sixteen days since I last had sex with my wife. I loved her, and I lost sight of her, and I took up with someone else. And although she never asked who it was or when it started or exactly what it was—sex, flirtation, lust—she said didn’t want to know, she wanted it to be done. She wanted me as a husband and a father again, but no longer as a friend. And I made a promise to her that I would end it, although the relationship had already reached its final chapter. By the time Anne confronted me, certain I had a mistress, my mistress had left me to marry someone else. I told Lisa that I loved her, and she didn’t care.
And so I find myself in a kind of love lock: pining for the wrong person, grieving beside a woman whose body I can’t touch, being given a second chance I can’t find the clarity to take.
Once upon a time, I was very in love with Anne-Laure, and—incredibly—she was in love with me. And sometimes, it still comes at me, the sight of her, my dark-haired, sea-eyed beauty, a woman I have built a life with that I don’t deserve. And I will think, Deserve her. Get back to the way you were in your apartment in Rhode Island, class-skipping together naked under a duvet, laughing about how many pillows Americans like on a bed; back to the woody Barolos she brown-bagged to BYOB dives; get back to her intelligence, her daringness. Get back to the French in her, timeless, free, and subtle. Get back to the person faking sleep beside you. Reach over, beg, get back.
Impossible as it is, I know that Anne still loves me. And when I catch myself looking at her across a room, atop a staircase, coming home from work with a shopping bag full of carefully chosen things, everything comes flooding back and it makes me fucking ache because I can no longer connect these memories that feel so warm when I think about them to what we’re currently living. Somewhere down the line, it got hard to just be kind, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know when, and when I see all of the reasons to be back in love with her again, I want more than anything to be swept up in the tide of before. Somewhere in the losing of my love for Anne, I lost a little bit of my love for everything else. And I don’t know what I’m waiting for to get those feelings back. Nor how long I—we—can wait.
1
MOMENTS OF great import are often tinged with darkness because perversely we yearn to be let down. And so it was that I found myself in late September 2002 at my first solo show in Paris feeling neither proud nor encouraged by the crowds of people who had come out to support my paintings, but saddened. Disappointed. If you had told me ten years ago that I’d be building my artistic reputation on a series of realistic oil paintings of rooms viewed through a keyhole, I would have pointed to my mixed-media collages of driftwood and saw blades and melted plastic ramen packets, the miniature green plastic soldiers I had implanted inside of Bubble Wrap, I would have jacked up the bass on the electronic musician Peaches’ Fancypants Hoodlum album and told you I would never sell out.
And yet here I was, surrounded by thirteen narrative paintings that depicted rooms I had lived in, or in some way experienced with various women over the course of my life, all of these executed with barely visible brushstrokes in a palette of oil colors that would look good on any wall, in any context, in any country. They weren’t contentious, they certainly weren’t political, and they were selling like mad.
Now, my impression that I’d sold out was a private one, shared neither by my gallerist, Julien, happily traipsing about the room affixing red dots to the drywall, nor by the swell of brightly dressed expatriates pushing their way through conversations to knock their plastic glasses of Chablis against mine. There was nothing to be grim about; I was relatively young and this was Paris, and this night was a night that I’d been working toward for some time. But from the minute I’d seen Julien place a red sticker underneath the first painting I’d done in the series, The Blue Bear, I’d been plagued by the feeling that I’d done something irreversible, that I wasn’t where I was supposed to be, that I hadn’t been for months. Worse yet, I had no anchor, no one to set me back on course. My wife of seven years, a no-nonsense French lawyer who had stuck by my side in grad school as I showcased found sculptures constructed from other people’s rubbish and dollhouses made out of Barbie Doll packaging, was a meter of my creative decline. Anne-Laure de Bourigeaud was not going to lie and tell me that I’d made it. The person who would have, the one person who I wanted to comfort and reboost me, was across the Channel with a man who was more reliable, easygoing, more available than me. And so it fell to the red stickers and the handshakes of would-be patrons to fuel me with self-worth. But halfway through the evening, with my own wife brightly sparkling in front of everyone but me, I was unmoored and drifting, tempted to sink.
• • •
In the car after the opening, Anne thrust the Peugeot into first gear. Driving stick in Paris is cathartic when she’s anxious. I often let her drive.
Anne strained against her seat belt, reaching out to verify that our daughter was wearing hers.
“You all right, princess?” I asked, turning around also.
Camille smoothed out the billowing layers of the ruffled pink tube skirt she’d picked out for Dad’s big night.
“Non . . .” she said, yawning.
“You didn’t take the last Yop, right?” This was asked of me, by my wife.
The streetlight cut into the car, illuminating the steering wheel, the dusty dashboard, the humming, buzzing electroland of our interior mobile world. Anne had had her hair done. I knew better than to ask, but I recognized the scent of the hairspray that made its metallic strawberry way, twice a month, into our lives.
I looked into her eyes that she had lined beautifully in the nonchalant and yet studied manner of the French. I forced a smile.
“No, I didn’t.”
“Good,” she said, edging the car out of the parking spot. “Cam-Cam, we’ll have a little snack when we get home.”
Paris. Paris at night. Paris at night is a street show of a hundred moments you might have lived. You might have been the couple beneath the streetlamp by the Place de la Concorde, holding out a camera directed at themselves. You might have been the old man on the bridge, staring at the houseboats. You might have been the person that girl was smiling in response to as she crossed that same bridge on her cell phone. Or you might be a man in a shitty French export engaged in a discussion about liquid yogurt with his wife. Paris is a city of a hundred million lights, and sometimes they flicker. Sometimes they go out.
Anne pushed on the radio, set it to the news. The molten contralto of the female announcer filled the silence of our car. “At an opening of a meeting at Camp David, British Prime Minister Tony Blair fully endorsed President Bush’s intention to find and destroy the weapons of mass destruction purportedly hidden in Iraq.” And then the reedy liltings of my once-proud prime minister: “The policy of inaction is not a policy we can responsibly subscribe to.”
“Right,” said Anne. “Inaction.”
“It’s madness,” I said, ignoring her pointed phrasing. “People getting scared because they’re told to be. Without asking why.”
Anne flicked on the blinker.
“It’s mostly displacement, I think. Verschiebung.” She tilted her chin up, proud of her arsenal of comp lit terms stored from undergrad. “The big questions are too frightening. You know, where to actually place blame. So they’ve picked an easy target.”
“You think France will go along with it?”
Her eyes darkened. “Never.”
I looked out the window at the endless river below us, dividing the right bank from the left bank, the rich from the richer. “It’s a bad sign, though, Blair joining up,” I added. “I mean, the British? We used to question things to death.”
Anne nodded and fell silent. The announcer went on to summarize the fiscal situation across the Eurozone since the introduction of the euro in January of 2002.
Anne turned down the volume and looked in the rearview mirror. “Cam, honey. Did you have a good time?”
“Um, it was okay,” our daughter, Camille, said, fiddling with her dress. “My favorite is the one with all the bicycles and then the, um, the one in the kitchen, and then the one with the blue bear that used to be in my room.”
I closed my eyes at all the women, even the small ones, who wield words like wands; their phrases sugary and innocuous one minute, corrosive the next.
Aesthetically, The Blue Bear was one of the largest and thus most expensive paintings in the show, but because I had originally painted it as a gift for Anne, it was also the most barbed.
At 117 x 140 cm, The Blue Bear is an oil painting of the guest room in a friend’s rickety, draft-ridden house in Centerville, Cape Cod, where we’d planned to spend the summer after grad school riding out the what-now crests of our midtwenties and to consider baby-making, which—if it wouldn’t answer the “what now?” question—would certainly answer “what next?”
The first among our group of friends to get married, it felt rebellious and artistic to consider having a child while we were still young and thin of limb and riotously in love. We also thought, however, that we were scheming in dreamland, safe beneath the mantra that has been the downfall of so many privileged white people: an unplanned pregnancy can’t happen to us.
Color us surprised, then, when a mere five weeks after having her IUD removed, Anne missed her period and started to notice a distinct throbbing in her breasts. We thought it was funny—so symbiotic were we in our tastes and desires that a mere discussion could push a possibility into being. We were delighted—amused, even. We felt blessed.
During those first few weeks on the Cape, I was still making sculptures out of found objects, and Anne, a gifted illustrator, was interspersing her studies for the European bar with new installments of a zine she’d started while studying abroad in Boston. A play on words with “Anne” (her name) and âne (the French word for “donkey”), Âne in America depicted the missteps of a shy, pessimistic Parisian indoctrinated into the boisterous world of cotton-candy-hearted, light-beer-guzzling Americans who relied on their inexhaustible optimism to see them through all things.
But as the summer inched on and I watched her caress her growing belly as she read laminated hardcovers from the town library, a curious change came over this Englishman who up until that point had been the enemy of sap. I became a sentimentalist, a tenderheart, an easy-listening sop. Much like how the lack of oxygen in planes makes us tear up at the most improbable of romantic comedies, as that child grew within Anne into a living, true-blue thing instead of a discussed possibility, I lost interest in the sea glass and the battered plastic cans and the porous wood I’d been using all summer and was filled with the urge to paint something lovely for her. For them both.
The idea of painting a scene viewed through a keyhole came to me when I happened upon Anne in the bedroom one morning pondering a stuffed teddy bear that our friends, the house’s owners, had left for us on a chair as an early baby gift. They were, at that point, our closest friends and the first people we had told about the pregnancy, but there was something about that stuffed animal that was both touching and foreboding. Would the baby play with it? Would the baby live? I could see the mix of trepidation and excitement playing over Anne’s face as she turned the stuffed brown thing over in her hands, and it comforted me to know that I wasn’t alone with my roller-coaster rides between pridefulness and fear.
And still—Anne is a woman, and I, rather evidently, am not. There was a great difference between what was happening to her and what was potentially happening—going to happen—to us. Which is how I got the idea to approach the scene from a distance, as an outsider, a voyeur.
Except for the tattered rug and the rocking chair beside a window with a view of the gray sea, I left the room uninhabited save for the stuffed bear that I painted seated on the rocking chair, a bit larger than it was in real life, and not at all brown. I painted the bear blue, and not a dim pastel color that might have been a trick of the light and sea, but a vibrating cerulean that lent to the otherwise staid atmosphere a pulsating point of interest. Unsettling in some lights, calming in others—the blue stood for the thrill of the unknown.
When I gave the painting to Anne, she never asked why the bear was blue. She knew why, inherently, and in the giving of the painting, I felt doubly convinced that I loved her, that I truly loved her, that I would love her for all time. What other woman could wordlessly accept such a confession? A tangible depiction of both happiness and fear?
In the fall, that painting traveled with our belongings in a ship across the Atlantic, and it waited in a Parisian storage center until the birth of our daughter, when we finally had a home. We hung it in the nursery, ignoring the comments from certain friends and in-laws that the bear would have been a lot less off-putting and child appropriate if it hadn’t been blue. The very fact that other people didn’t seem to “get it” convinced us that we had a shared sensibility, something truly special, making the painting more important than a private joke.
We continued feeling that way until Camille turned three and started plastering her walls with her own drawings and paper cutouts and origami birds, and we began to feel like we’d enforced something upon her that only meant something to us. So we put it in the basement, intending to scout for a new bookshelf system so that we would have enough wall space to hang the painting in our bedroom. But then I met Lisa, and too much time had passed, and when The Blue Bear was brought up, the discussions were accusatory, spiteful. And so it stayed in the basement, hidden out of sight, not so much forgotten as disdained.
Months later, when I started gathering the paintings for the exhibition, my gallerist said he still remembered the first key painting I’d ever shown him, and that he’d been impressed by it. Might I consider including it in the show? The suspicion that The Blue Bear didn’t mean what it used to mean was confirmed when I told Anne about Julien’s proposition and she said if he thought it made the show more complete somehow, what did she care. Go ahead and listen to him. Sell.
• • •
After finding a parking spot outside of our house in the fourteenth, we moved automatically into our pit-crew positions to execute the life-sustaining gestures of our domestic life. While Anne gave Camille the aforementioned liquid yogurt, I went upstairs to draw her a bath, adding a peach bath ball that she liked. Anne came in to supervise her splashing while I tidied up the kitchen. Then I tucked her in bed and kissed her, and her mother read her a story before lights-out.
In our bathroom, I brushed my teeth quickly and splashed water on my face. Without it ever being stated, I knew well enough to be out before Anne came in so that she could take care of her own needs without having to look up and see the reflection of my face next to hers.
I slipped into bed and waited for the distant sound of singsong reading to fade. When I heard my wife’s footsteps in the hallway, I picked up the book on my nightstand and started to read Poor Fellow My Country, the longest Australian novel of all time.
Anne went into the bathroom, shut me out with a closed door. When she came to bed, she did so smelling of rosemary with her dark hair in a high bun, hair I had been besotted with back in grad school, but now no longer touched. She said good night without looking at me, and I said good night back.
It has been seven months and sixteen days since I last had sex with my wife. I loved her, and I lost sight of her, and I took up with someone else. And although she never asked who it was or when it started or exactly what it was—sex, flirtation, lust—she said didn’t want to know, she wanted it to be done. She wanted me as a husband and a father again, but no longer as a friend. And I made a promise to her that I would end it, although the relationship had already reached its final chapter. By the time Anne confronted me, certain I had a mistress, my mistress had left me to marry someone else. I told Lisa that I loved her, and she didn’t care.
And so I find myself in a kind of love lock: pining for the wrong person, grieving beside a woman whose body I can’t touch, being given a second chance I can’t find the clarity to take.
Once upon a time, I was very in love with Anne-Laure, and—incredibly—she was in love with me. And sometimes, it still comes at me, the sight of her, my dark-haired, sea-eyed beauty, a woman I have built a life with that I don’t deserve. And I will think, Deserve her. Get back to the way you were in your apartment in Rhode Island, class-skipping together naked under a duvet, laughing about how many pillows Americans like on a bed; back to the woody Barolos she brown-bagged to BYOB dives; get back to her intelligence, her daringness. Get back to the French in her, timeless, free, and subtle. Get back to the person faking sleep beside you. Reach over, beg, get back.
Impossible as it is, I know that Anne still loves me. And when I catch myself looking at her across a room, atop a staircase, coming home from work with a shopping bag full of carefully chosen things, everything comes flooding back and it makes me fucking ache because I can no longer connect these memories that feel so warm when I think about them to what we’re currently living. Somewhere down the line, it got hard to just be kind, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know when, and when I see all of the reasons to be back in love with her again, I want more than anything to be swept up in the tide of before. Somewhere in the losing of my love for Anne, I lost a little bit of my love for everything else. And I don’t know what I’m waiting for to get those feelings back. Nor how long I—we—can wait.
Reading Group Guide
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This reading group guide for I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You includes an introduction, discussion questions, ideas for enhancing your book club, and a Q&A with author Courtney Maum. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.
Introduction
Richard Haddon’s life seems picture-perfect. He has a beautiful French wife and a healthy daughter; a flourishing artistic career; and, to top it off, an American mistress on the side named Lisa. But when Lisa leaves him to marry another man—and his wife, Anne-Laure, discovers his affair—reality begins to set in for Richard. He must face his decision to cheat on his wife and sell out as an artist simultaneously; he must mourn the loss of his mistress, his marriage, and his sense of self all at once. As if by fate’s hand, the sudden sale of an old painting from early in his career and marriage suddenly spurs Richard out of his slump, and he becomes determined to mend his mistakes and make his wife fall back in love with him, whatever the cost. Poignant and sincere, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You explores what it takes to right a wrong, and how to figure out what’s worth saving.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. The novel begins with the statement, “Moments of great import are often tinged with darkness because perversely we yearn to be let down” (p. 1). Consider this in light of Anne-Laure and Richard’s marriage. In what ways is their marriage “tinged with darkness”? Do you agree that Richard wanted to be let down? Why or why not?
2. Early in the novel, Richard explains their financial situation: Richard, a struggling artist, and Anne-Laure, a law student, accept help from Anne’s parents to buy a house while expecting their daughter. While Anne “never felt guilty about accepting her parents’ cash” (p. 29), Richard did, feeling that he let “the shame of such a handout build inside . . . until it made me feel like less of a man, less of an artist, less than everything I had one day hoped to be” (p. 29). Discuss the theme of shame in the novel. How do Richard’s expectations for himself differ from the reality of his life? In what way(s) does shame drive Richard to do what he does? Do you think shame also drives Anne-Laure?
3. The Blue Bear is continually compared to Richard’s key paintings throughout the novel. While the former was painted during a particularly emotional time in Richard’s life, the latter series “was effortless . . . [m]editative” (p. 31), painted in a “nostalgic fugue state” (p. 31). How do the two paintings act as metaphors for Richard’s life? Do you think there is any meaning in Richard painting himself outside of the room, with a limited point of view, in the key paintings and in The Blue Bear?
4. Discuss the ways in which Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage is portrayed in the novel. Are their marital problems unusual or ordinary? Can you determine what might have gone wrong in their marriage to cause Richard to stray?
5. So much of the novel centers on the power of the visual to transcend language. And it is Richard, the artist, who struggles the most with finding the words to say what he means. In a casual conversation with Anne, Richard refers to himself as a “traitor” for wanting to leave Julian’s gallery—a word loaded with meaning given Richard’s recent past. Richard laments his inability to express himself, claiming his “words were never right” (p. 66). What are other examples in the novel when words fail Richard? In what ways does he rely on his artwork to do the talking for him? Does Richard ultimately discover a way to express himself?
6. Revisit the scene where Anne-Laure discovers Lisa’s letters in Richard’s bag (pages 95-99). What makes this scene so heart-wrenching? Do you think Anne-Laure did the right thing by asking Richard to leave immediately? Would you have done the same? Imagine Richard had thrown away the letters as he planned—do you think their marriage would have healed sooner?
7. Revisit the scene on page 184 when Anne-Laure reveals to her parents that Richard was unfaithful. How does the their response to infidelity compare with the response from Richard’s parents? How does Lisa’s response differ from the responses of Richard’s and Anne-Laure’s parents? Discuss how these three responses—French, British, and American—might imply cultural differences regarding extramarital affairs.
8. The personal—Richard and Anne-Laure’s relationship—and the political—the increasing conflict in Iraq—intersect greatly in the novel. How do they relate? How do they evoke different kinds of uncertainty?
9. Why do you think Richard decides to move out of the house? Do you think he believes in the saying, If you love something, give it away? Do you? Turn to page 244 and discuss.
10. Do you think that Richard and Anne-Laure feel similarly about infidelity? Does one character seem more flexible about the rules of monogamy? If so, do these responses support or debunk cultural stereotypes?
11. Discuss Richard’s video project. What’s at stake for him in this project? How does it have a similar voice, so to speak, as The Blue Bear? In what ways do both projects explore absence?
12. “Because in the end, that’s why some of us stupid humans get married. Because we know that we can lose each other, and find each other again. Because we’re capable of forgiveness. Or at least, we think we are” (p. 326). Is this a true definition of what marriage means? Does Anne-Laure save the marriage in the end, when Richard could not? How so?
13. Explore the implications of the title. Who is having so much fun alone? Is the title meant to be ironic? What might you cite as the overall message of the novel?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Richard’s new installation, WarWash, is about cleansing oneself from mistakes, bad choices, or moments in life we would like to forget. For his character, WarWash is symbolic of moving past his affair and a war he cannot control—it is the defining, cathartic moment for his character in the novel. Have your own “washing” ceremony with your book club. Have each member contribute one or two items that they would like to have metaphorically cleansed. Submerge those items in water and discuss how you feel after having rid yourself of the “dirt.” Do you feel better? Consider how this moment in the novel acts as a hinge—do you think the door to forgiveness is opened after the installation? Why?
2. “I paused the camera and sat back in a chair. I had no idea what I was doing. But there was something grounding about being with them in the kitchen, filming this place where I’d eaten countless bowls of cereal and not done enough dishes, been bandaged and given biscuits, and had my dirty nails scrubbed with a brush” (p. 149). Here, Richard thinks about being in his childhood home and what it means to be back where you came from—your origin. Use Richard’s meditation on origin to consider your own: Where are you from? What does the space physically look like? Do the memories correspond with the feeling, like Richard’s do? Freewrite for ten minutes about your own childhood home, and then share with the group. How did that home shape you into the person you are today? Do you believe you must reckon with your past before you can solve today’s problems?
3. In the novel, The Blue Bear acts as a vehicle for expressing the ineffable: deep love for one’s new life, fears about losing someone, failing at monogamy, forgiveness, etc. Take a trip with your book club to a local gallery or museum. Enjoy the artwork together, then separate and find a painting or sculpture that speaks to you, that expresses something you feel but haven’t been able to say. Take a picture or write down a few lines in a notebook about how you feel in the presence of the art. Over lunch, share your artwork with your book club. What is it about visual art that speaks so clearly? What drew you to the artwork you chose? Does having your “own” art help make clear the emotions tied to The Blue Bear for Richard and Anne? Why or why not?
A Conversation with Courtney Maum
You split your time among New York City, the Berkshires, and Paris. Describe how the places you have lived helped you write this novel. Why did you decide to set I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You in Paris? How does the culture of Paris impact the story of Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage?
I set the novel in Paris because that’s where I was living at the time I wrote it. Paris will forever appear in my mind’s eye as a glittering panorama of different monuments and vistas and intimate little scenes: cafés I love, parks I like to sit in with a baguette sandwich, the various places I’ve been shat on by birds—and I wanted to infuse the novel with my visual affection for the city. Lots of French people, Parisians especially, don’t get married. They have children or share property with their partners, and that suffices—emotionally and often legally—to “legitimize” their relationship. In France, more than in America, extramarital affairs aren’t looked upon as a guillotine for marriage. I once knew someone who said that her parents’ marriage was actually ameliorated by the fact that her father had a mistress that her mother knew about. So certainly, the option for forgiveness that hovers between Richard and Anne is there thanks in part to the sexual open-mindedness of French culture. As for the Berkshires, I can tell you that when you live in the middle of the woods thirty minutes away from the nearest cup of coffee, you get a lot of writing done! My relationship to New York City is a professional one: I work as a corporate namer and brand strategist for several agencies there, and that’s where a lot of my contacts are.
Why did you decide to tell the story from Richard’s point of view? As a woman, did you face any particular challenges writing from his perspective?
The novel started off as a short story that I never even thought of writing from a woman’s point of view—I’d have to spend some serious time in psychoanalysis to find out why. I think my internal voice skews somewhat masculine to begin with, and I’ve had a lot of jobs in male-dominated industries. For example, my first job was at Maxim. And then, for many years I worked as a party promoter for Corona Extra in France. I loved writing from Richard’s point of view. I think I would have been far more challenged if I’d tried to write it from Anne’s.
You mention T. S. Eliot in the novel. Is he one of your literary influences? Who else do you read?
Other than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” being one of the most chillingly beautiful poems of all time, he isn’t, no. I’m always coming across work that inspires me, but in terms of major influences, I’d say: Martin Amis, Michel Houellebecq, Jonathan Franzen, A.M Homes, Jim Shepard, John Kennedy Toole, and Robert Stone. I also take a lot of inspiration from musicians and lyricists who create a mood or sentiment I want to capture. Notables would be the late Dory Previn, Alex Beaupain, James Blake, Arnaud Fleurent-Didier, and Joni Mitchell. Current writers I’m loving are Douglas Watson, Ravi Mangla, Maggie Shipstead, and Laura van den Berg.
Are any of the characters based on people you know, or on yourself? Which character do you relate to most and why?
Didactic (the reverse graffiti artist) exists, although his real street name is Moose. And Azar Sabounjian, the gallerist who accepts the WarWash exhibit, is based on real-life gallerist Kamel Mennour. Richard’s parents and Anne’s parents aren’t based on real people, but they feel very real to me! There is a little bit of me in almost every character, so there isn’t one that I relate to more than another, although I’m probably a messy amalgamation of Richard, Lisa, Julien, Anne, and Anne’s mother. Yikes.
So much of this novel seems to center around problems with language and the possibilities of the visual to say the unsayable. Is the tension between what’s seen and perceived versus what’s said something that interests you?
Oh, definitely. I, for one, am a sayer. Up until several years ago, my default setting was to communicate my emotions through writing, but now I try to be brave enough to have tough conversations with people face-to-face. But like most writers, I’m an incorrigible voyeur: I’m constantly watching the body language of those around me and listening for what isn’t said. It’s pretty odd that the visual is used so heavily to communicate in this novel because I’m not a terribly visual person—for instance, I hate taking photographs, and always have.
What would you name as the major themes of this novel?
Forgiveness. Compassion. Love. Faith.
Describe the research that went into the making of this novel. Which aspect of the book required the most? The least?
I am obsessed with minute details, and I delight in building my fiction on a foundation of fact. The timeline of the book was the hardest part of the research—making sure that the progress toward what would become the Iraq war synched with Richard’s artistic projects and also with Anne’s unfolding lawsuit, which is based on a legal dispute that was actually taking place at the time. I don’t know why I’m so compulsive about weaving in real things: the Nan Goldin exhibit where Richard first met Lisa, for example, is an exhibit that actually did take place on that very day, and I checked to make sure the restaurant where they have their cocktails was open on that day, at that time, and so forth. I took great pains to make sure everything that was eaten, purchased, and so on in the novel could have been done in such-and-such a location in such-and-such a year. Now that I’ve admitted that, dear readers, don’t get in touch if I got something wrong because it will eat away at me forever!
In a post on your Tumblr, you mention the years that went into the making of this book. Can you briefly describe for us the long journey of completing your first novel? Do you have any advice for young writers struggling to be published?
Curiously, I first wrote this book before I was married, when I was twenty-five. I was busy revising it for an editor at a major publishing house when this editor up and left her job, leaving me orphaned, disillusioned, crushed. My then-agent sent it out to eighteen other editors, who sent back eighteen rejections. Fast-forward ten years later, my current all-star agent, Rebecca Gradinger, convinced me to resurrect the project and give it another chance. By that time, I myself had been married almost as long as the couple in the book and was pregnant with our first child. I decided to rewrite the book entirely, using many of the same characters, which allowed me to draw from my personal experience of matrimony, which surely improved the book. In terms of advice, I HAVE SO MUCH! I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wasted time feeling angry, but to respect your request for brevity, I’ll just say: keep your head down, don’t be bitter, get off Facebook, do the work.
Courtney also writes an advice column for Tin House that deals with the writing life. Some articles that might be useful for young writers:
How Not to Hate Your Friends (https://www.tinhouse.com/blog/32875/how-not-to-hate-your-friends.html)
How to Stay Sane While Querying Literary Agents (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/16373/how-to-stay-sane-while-querying-literary-agents.html)
Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers: Part I (http://networkedblogs.com/xnVK0),
and Part II (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/15284/super-sad-true-habits-of-highly-effective-writers-part-two.html)
Six Ways Reading Series Can Improve Your Writing (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/11406/six-ways-a-reading-series-can-improve-your-writing.html)
Do you think the story of Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage is a common tale? How do you think Richard and Anne-Laure were able to rectify their broken marriage? Can lost lust—that first attraction—ever really be reclaimed? Ultimately, do you think this novel asserts that a relationship is a continual work in progress?
I think it’s all too common that spouses or life partners fall out of love with each other, start to resent each other, and so forth. And certainly, a lot of people cheat, and do so secretly behind the other’s back. I think Anne and Richard were able to stay married because they took the long view of their relationship and were able to assess that, yes, the initial “flame” had extinguished, but that they really functioned as a couple, that they loved the life they had built, and they were willing to try and forgive each other in order to salvage their relationship. Really, it comes down to being realistic about the fact that most people can’t sleep beside the same partner for the rest of their life without losing some sexual desire for that person. I do think that all relationships are works in progress; they simply can’t not be. Even if you have the most predicable, safe, committed marriage known to mankind, outside forces come into play to change things. Your partner gets hit by a bus and is paralyzed from the waist down. You’re not going to go on ordering sushi and watching Netflix every Friday night once that happens.
Can you share with us some insight into your next writing project?
I’ve been writing a real-time memoir ever since I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, and for her first birthday in September 2014, I’d like to get it into shareable shape. Similarly, I have a novel I wrote before I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You that could stand some revision. I have a satirical nonfiction project I’ve started research for and am really itching to write, and I’ve got a massive novel incubating, but right now, it’s just a feeling, a chord progression, a seed. So there you have my scattered five-year plan.
Introduction
Richard Haddon’s life seems picture-perfect. He has a beautiful French wife and a healthy daughter; a flourishing artistic career; and, to top it off, an American mistress on the side named Lisa. But when Lisa leaves him to marry another man—and his wife, Anne-Laure, discovers his affair—reality begins to set in for Richard. He must face his decision to cheat on his wife and sell out as an artist simultaneously; he must mourn the loss of his mistress, his marriage, and his sense of self all at once. As if by fate’s hand, the sudden sale of an old painting from early in his career and marriage suddenly spurs Richard out of his slump, and he becomes determined to mend his mistakes and make his wife fall back in love with him, whatever the cost. Poignant and sincere, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You explores what it takes to right a wrong, and how to figure out what’s worth saving.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. The novel begins with the statement, “Moments of great import are often tinged with darkness because perversely we yearn to be let down” (p. 1). Consider this in light of Anne-Laure and Richard’s marriage. In what ways is their marriage “tinged with darkness”? Do you agree that Richard wanted to be let down? Why or why not?
2. Early in the novel, Richard explains their financial situation: Richard, a struggling artist, and Anne-Laure, a law student, accept help from Anne’s parents to buy a house while expecting their daughter. While Anne “never felt guilty about accepting her parents’ cash” (p. 29), Richard did, feeling that he let “the shame of such a handout build inside . . . until it made me feel like less of a man, less of an artist, less than everything I had one day hoped to be” (p. 29). Discuss the theme of shame in the novel. How do Richard’s expectations for himself differ from the reality of his life? In what way(s) does shame drive Richard to do what he does? Do you think shame also drives Anne-Laure?
3. The Blue Bear is continually compared to Richard’s key paintings throughout the novel. While the former was painted during a particularly emotional time in Richard’s life, the latter series “was effortless . . . [m]editative” (p. 31), painted in a “nostalgic fugue state” (p. 31). How do the two paintings act as metaphors for Richard’s life? Do you think there is any meaning in Richard painting himself outside of the room, with a limited point of view, in the key paintings and in The Blue Bear?
4. Discuss the ways in which Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage is portrayed in the novel. Are their marital problems unusual or ordinary? Can you determine what might have gone wrong in their marriage to cause Richard to stray?
5. So much of the novel centers on the power of the visual to transcend language. And it is Richard, the artist, who struggles the most with finding the words to say what he means. In a casual conversation with Anne, Richard refers to himself as a “traitor” for wanting to leave Julian’s gallery—a word loaded with meaning given Richard’s recent past. Richard laments his inability to express himself, claiming his “words were never right” (p. 66). What are other examples in the novel when words fail Richard? In what ways does he rely on his artwork to do the talking for him? Does Richard ultimately discover a way to express himself?
6. Revisit the scene where Anne-Laure discovers Lisa’s letters in Richard’s bag (pages 95-99). What makes this scene so heart-wrenching? Do you think Anne-Laure did the right thing by asking Richard to leave immediately? Would you have done the same? Imagine Richard had thrown away the letters as he planned—do you think their marriage would have healed sooner?
7. Revisit the scene on page 184 when Anne-Laure reveals to her parents that Richard was unfaithful. How does the their response to infidelity compare with the response from Richard’s parents? How does Lisa’s response differ from the responses of Richard’s and Anne-Laure’s parents? Discuss how these three responses—French, British, and American—might imply cultural differences regarding extramarital affairs.
8. The personal—Richard and Anne-Laure’s relationship—and the political—the increasing conflict in Iraq—intersect greatly in the novel. How do they relate? How do they evoke different kinds of uncertainty?
9. Why do you think Richard decides to move out of the house? Do you think he believes in the saying, If you love something, give it away? Do you? Turn to page 244 and discuss.
10. Do you think that Richard and Anne-Laure feel similarly about infidelity? Does one character seem more flexible about the rules of monogamy? If so, do these responses support or debunk cultural stereotypes?
11. Discuss Richard’s video project. What’s at stake for him in this project? How does it have a similar voice, so to speak, as The Blue Bear? In what ways do both projects explore absence?
12. “Because in the end, that’s why some of us stupid humans get married. Because we know that we can lose each other, and find each other again. Because we’re capable of forgiveness. Or at least, we think we are” (p. 326). Is this a true definition of what marriage means? Does Anne-Laure save the marriage in the end, when Richard could not? How so?
13. Explore the implications of the title. Who is having so much fun alone? Is the title meant to be ironic? What might you cite as the overall message of the novel?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Richard’s new installation, WarWash, is about cleansing oneself from mistakes, bad choices, or moments in life we would like to forget. For his character, WarWash is symbolic of moving past his affair and a war he cannot control—it is the defining, cathartic moment for his character in the novel. Have your own “washing” ceremony with your book club. Have each member contribute one or two items that they would like to have metaphorically cleansed. Submerge those items in water and discuss how you feel after having rid yourself of the “dirt.” Do you feel better? Consider how this moment in the novel acts as a hinge—do you think the door to forgiveness is opened after the installation? Why?
2. “I paused the camera and sat back in a chair. I had no idea what I was doing. But there was something grounding about being with them in the kitchen, filming this place where I’d eaten countless bowls of cereal and not done enough dishes, been bandaged and given biscuits, and had my dirty nails scrubbed with a brush” (p. 149). Here, Richard thinks about being in his childhood home and what it means to be back where you came from—your origin. Use Richard’s meditation on origin to consider your own: Where are you from? What does the space physically look like? Do the memories correspond with the feeling, like Richard’s do? Freewrite for ten minutes about your own childhood home, and then share with the group. How did that home shape you into the person you are today? Do you believe you must reckon with your past before you can solve today’s problems?
3. In the novel, The Blue Bear acts as a vehicle for expressing the ineffable: deep love for one’s new life, fears about losing someone, failing at monogamy, forgiveness, etc. Take a trip with your book club to a local gallery or museum. Enjoy the artwork together, then separate and find a painting or sculpture that speaks to you, that expresses something you feel but haven’t been able to say. Take a picture or write down a few lines in a notebook about how you feel in the presence of the art. Over lunch, share your artwork with your book club. What is it about visual art that speaks so clearly? What drew you to the artwork you chose? Does having your “own” art help make clear the emotions tied to The Blue Bear for Richard and Anne? Why or why not?
A Conversation with Courtney Maum
You split your time among New York City, the Berkshires, and Paris. Describe how the places you have lived helped you write this novel. Why did you decide to set I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You in Paris? How does the culture of Paris impact the story of Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage?
I set the novel in Paris because that’s where I was living at the time I wrote it. Paris will forever appear in my mind’s eye as a glittering panorama of different monuments and vistas and intimate little scenes: cafés I love, parks I like to sit in with a baguette sandwich, the various places I’ve been shat on by birds—and I wanted to infuse the novel with my visual affection for the city. Lots of French people, Parisians especially, don’t get married. They have children or share property with their partners, and that suffices—emotionally and often legally—to “legitimize” their relationship. In France, more than in America, extramarital affairs aren’t looked upon as a guillotine for marriage. I once knew someone who said that her parents’ marriage was actually ameliorated by the fact that her father had a mistress that her mother knew about. So certainly, the option for forgiveness that hovers between Richard and Anne is there thanks in part to the sexual open-mindedness of French culture. As for the Berkshires, I can tell you that when you live in the middle of the woods thirty minutes away from the nearest cup of coffee, you get a lot of writing done! My relationship to New York City is a professional one: I work as a corporate namer and brand strategist for several agencies there, and that’s where a lot of my contacts are.
Why did you decide to tell the story from Richard’s point of view? As a woman, did you face any particular challenges writing from his perspective?
The novel started off as a short story that I never even thought of writing from a woman’s point of view—I’d have to spend some serious time in psychoanalysis to find out why. I think my internal voice skews somewhat masculine to begin with, and I’ve had a lot of jobs in male-dominated industries. For example, my first job was at Maxim. And then, for many years I worked as a party promoter for Corona Extra in France. I loved writing from Richard’s point of view. I think I would have been far more challenged if I’d tried to write it from Anne’s.
You mention T. S. Eliot in the novel. Is he one of your literary influences? Who else do you read?
Other than “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” being one of the most chillingly beautiful poems of all time, he isn’t, no. I’m always coming across work that inspires me, but in terms of major influences, I’d say: Martin Amis, Michel Houellebecq, Jonathan Franzen, A.M Homes, Jim Shepard, John Kennedy Toole, and Robert Stone. I also take a lot of inspiration from musicians and lyricists who create a mood or sentiment I want to capture. Notables would be the late Dory Previn, Alex Beaupain, James Blake, Arnaud Fleurent-Didier, and Joni Mitchell. Current writers I’m loving are Douglas Watson, Ravi Mangla, Maggie Shipstead, and Laura van den Berg.
Are any of the characters based on people you know, or on yourself? Which character do you relate to most and why?
Didactic (the reverse graffiti artist) exists, although his real street name is Moose. And Azar Sabounjian, the gallerist who accepts the WarWash exhibit, is based on real-life gallerist Kamel Mennour. Richard’s parents and Anne’s parents aren’t based on real people, but they feel very real to me! There is a little bit of me in almost every character, so there isn’t one that I relate to more than another, although I’m probably a messy amalgamation of Richard, Lisa, Julien, Anne, and Anne’s mother. Yikes.
So much of this novel seems to center around problems with language and the possibilities of the visual to say the unsayable. Is the tension between what’s seen and perceived versus what’s said something that interests you?
Oh, definitely. I, for one, am a sayer. Up until several years ago, my default setting was to communicate my emotions through writing, but now I try to be brave enough to have tough conversations with people face-to-face. But like most writers, I’m an incorrigible voyeur: I’m constantly watching the body language of those around me and listening for what isn’t said. It’s pretty odd that the visual is used so heavily to communicate in this novel because I’m not a terribly visual person—for instance, I hate taking photographs, and always have.
What would you name as the major themes of this novel?
Forgiveness. Compassion. Love. Faith.
Describe the research that went into the making of this novel. Which aspect of the book required the most? The least?
I am obsessed with minute details, and I delight in building my fiction on a foundation of fact. The timeline of the book was the hardest part of the research—making sure that the progress toward what would become the Iraq war synched with Richard’s artistic projects and also with Anne’s unfolding lawsuit, which is based on a legal dispute that was actually taking place at the time. I don’t know why I’m so compulsive about weaving in real things: the Nan Goldin exhibit where Richard first met Lisa, for example, is an exhibit that actually did take place on that very day, and I checked to make sure the restaurant where they have their cocktails was open on that day, at that time, and so forth. I took great pains to make sure everything that was eaten, purchased, and so on in the novel could have been done in such-and-such a location in such-and-such a year. Now that I’ve admitted that, dear readers, don’t get in touch if I got something wrong because it will eat away at me forever!
In a post on your Tumblr, you mention the years that went into the making of this book. Can you briefly describe for us the long journey of completing your first novel? Do you have any advice for young writers struggling to be published?
Curiously, I first wrote this book before I was married, when I was twenty-five. I was busy revising it for an editor at a major publishing house when this editor up and left her job, leaving me orphaned, disillusioned, crushed. My then-agent sent it out to eighteen other editors, who sent back eighteen rejections. Fast-forward ten years later, my current all-star agent, Rebecca Gradinger, convinced me to resurrect the project and give it another chance. By that time, I myself had been married almost as long as the couple in the book and was pregnant with our first child. I decided to rewrite the book entirely, using many of the same characters, which allowed me to draw from my personal experience of matrimony, which surely improved the book. In terms of advice, I HAVE SO MUCH! I made a lot of mistakes along the way and wasted time feeling angry, but to respect your request for brevity, I’ll just say: keep your head down, don’t be bitter, get off Facebook, do the work.
Courtney also writes an advice column for Tin House that deals with the writing life. Some articles that might be useful for young writers:
How Not to Hate Your Friends (https://www.tinhouse.com/blog/32875/how-not-to-hate-your-friends.html)
How to Stay Sane While Querying Literary Agents (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/16373/how-to-stay-sane-while-querying-literary-agents.html)
Super Sad True Habits of Highly Effective Writers: Part I (http://networkedblogs.com/xnVK0),
and Part II (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/15284/super-sad-true-habits-of-highly-effective-writers-part-two.html)
Six Ways Reading Series Can Improve Your Writing (http://www.tinhouse.com/blog/11406/six-ways-a-reading-series-can-improve-your-writing.html)
Do you think the story of Richard and Anne-Laure’s marriage is a common tale? How do you think Richard and Anne-Laure were able to rectify their broken marriage? Can lost lust—that first attraction—ever really be reclaimed? Ultimately, do you think this novel asserts that a relationship is a continual work in progress?
I think it’s all too common that spouses or life partners fall out of love with each other, start to resent each other, and so forth. And certainly, a lot of people cheat, and do so secretly behind the other’s back. I think Anne and Richard were able to stay married because they took the long view of their relationship and were able to assess that, yes, the initial “flame” had extinguished, but that they really functioned as a couple, that they loved the life they had built, and they were willing to try and forgive each other in order to salvage their relationship. Really, it comes down to being realistic about the fact that most people can’t sleep beside the same partner for the rest of their life without losing some sexual desire for that person. I do think that all relationships are works in progress; they simply can’t not be. Even if you have the most predicable, safe, committed marriage known to mankind, outside forces come into play to change things. Your partner gets hit by a bus and is paralyzed from the waist down. You’re not going to go on ordering sushi and watching Netflix every Friday night once that happens.
Can you share with us some insight into your next writing project?
I’ve been writing a real-time memoir ever since I found out I was pregnant with my daughter, and for her first birthday in September 2014, I’d like to get it into shareable shape. Similarly, I have a novel I wrote before I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You that could stand some revision. I have a satirical nonfiction project I’ve started research for and am really itching to write, and I’ve got a massive novel incubating, but right now, it’s just a feeling, a chord progression, a seed. So there you have my scattered five-year plan.
About The Author
Photograph by Colin Lane
Courtney Maum graduated from Brown University with a degree in Comparative Literature. She then lived in France for five years where she worked as a party promoter for Corona Extra, which had everything to do with getting a Visa, and nothing to do with her degree. Today, Maum splits her time between the Berkshires, New York City, and Paris, working as a creative brand strategist, corporate namer, and humor columnist. Visit her at CourtneyMaum.Tumblr.com or on Twitter @CMaum.
Product Details
- Publisher: Touchstone (April 1, 2015)
- Length: 368 pages
- ISBN13: 9781476764559
Browse Related Books
Raves and Reviews
Best Book of 2014:
Real Simple
Bustle
Flavorwire
Electric Literature
“Maum is funny: the kind of funny that is mean and dirty, with some good bad words thrown in. And she has a satiric eye for artsy pretension. . . . Enticing.”
– New York Times Book Review
“Here we have the literary beach read — a book that pleases people who read two books a month and people who read two books a year. . . . The situation is timeworn and irresistible. The settings . . . are idyllic escapes, lushly drawn. . . . [Maum] is abundantly gifted — funny, open-hearted, adept at bringing global issues into the personal sphere . . . eventually creating that rare thing: a book for everyone.”
– Washington Post
"Funny, touching and wise about love and vanity, this seductive debut might leave you rethinking some decisions of your own."
– People, People Picks Book of the Week
“A great story about love and marriage . . . Very enchanting, a good beach read.”
– Today Show, Summer's Top Reads
"Maum is not only convincing, but emotionally aggrandizing in her exploration of the challenges of love and marriage. . . . The characters are so identifiable in their cringeable weaknesses and reasonable mistakes, that it is hard not to see oneself in them." —Brooklyn Daily Eagle
“Courtney Maum bursts onto the scene with a hilarious and wise novel. . . . Richard Haddon is one of the more lovable male characters we've encountered this season. . . . You'll find yourself agog at Maum's masterful storytelling and dead-on descriptions.”
– Glamour
“Dry-as-a-bone humor, a realistic marriage with all its pitfalls and joys, artists portrayed as real people instead of caricatures, and France! You don’t need another perfect novel for summer—this is it.” —BookRiot
“Well-written . . . Takes some turns that are both unexpected and entertaining. . . . I won’t be the only reader eagerly awaiting Maum’s next undertaking.”—Roanoke Times
"The dialogue is pointed, witty and direct about sex, art and familial relationships. The characters are perceptive to a fault, and there is plenty of introspection. If nothing else, this fixes the love story in modern times."—Berkshire Eagle
“Filled with humor, as well as painful yearning. There is much heart in Courtney Maum’s page-turning debut novel, making it a terrifically satisfying and memorable read.”
– BookReporter
"A charming and engrossing portrait of one man's midlife mess . . . Smart, fast-paced . . . You come for the plot, but you stay for the characters—especially Maum's flawed but likable and basically well-intentioned hero. Ultimately, this is the story of a man who would do anything to be a better person, and you will avidly wish for him to succeed."
– Elle
"A winning first novel of infidelity, forgiveness, and (maybe, just maybe) falling back in love.”
– O Magazine, 15 Titles to Pick Up Now
“Funny and soulful . . . Filled with wise and revealing insights about the mature rewards embattled marriages provide. . . . [An] immensely appealing novel.”
– The Wall Street Journal
“[An] affably comic take on husbandly comeuppance, Courtney Maum’s I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You follows a once-sizzling British artist’s hilariously misguided efforts to win back the love of his wife.”
– Vogue
“[A] witty novel about an artist galvanized by the sale of a painting to confront some tough questions about fidelity and marriage. It’s got emotions, humor — and a really great title.”
– The Miami Herald
“Dry-as-a-bone humor, a realistic marriage with all its pitfalls and joys, artists portrayed as real people instead of caricatures, and France! You don’t need another perfect novel for summer–this is it.” —BookRiot
“Her portrait of marriage — much like her view of Paris — is clear-eyed and unsentimental. . . . Maum is hilarious, and the book manages to be cynical and heartfelt at the same time.”
– Arizona Republic
"Need[s] to be in your beach bag."
– Marie Claire
“Courtney Maum kills it.”
– Vanity Fair
“Hit the beach (or the backyard) with [this] can't-put-down novel.”
– New York Daily News
"A very funny comedy of modern manners."
– Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Maum’s raw honesty about the hard work of long-term relationships, what is said and left unsaid, and her intimate knowledge of Paris make this a bittersweet yet comical read.”
– Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Maum's witty and insightful novel captures a lifetime of falling in and out of love. It's an investigation of marriage which often combines its utter clear-sightedness and its tremendous warmth in the very same sentence. So agile and fully realized."
– Ned Beauman, author of The Teleportation Accident
“Maum is beautifully clear-eyed about the ways we fail each other and ourselves. . . . Zinging like Lorrie Moore . . . the narrative takes satisfyingly unexpected turns. . . . Rarely is a novel this funny quite so dark, but Maum takes that risk with substantial payoff. . . . This is a novel that remains stubbornly honest and optimistic about love.”
– Brooklyn Rail
"Maum is awesome enough to cop to working as a Corona Extra party promoter in her official author bio, and funny enough to be the humor columnist for Electric Literature. Read this if your vacation plans sadly do not include hanging out with eccentric, upwardly mobile Euros."
– Nylon
"The characters and setting provide delightful fodder. . . . A brutally honest reckoning of the challenges of fidelity and family."
– Nerve
“The giant, thumping heart of Courtney Maum’s debut novel beats loud and fast from its very first pages. . . . With wit and humor, Maum brings Richard’s lopsided love story to life.”
– Bustle.com
“A delicious read that also has a lot to say about contemporary marriage.”
– Flavorwire.com
“Told with cutting wit and deep emotion, this is a heartfelt look at love and fidelity in the contemporary era.”
– Fodors.com, “10 Books to Read on Your Summer Vacation”
“A very charming and romantic book.”
– Buzzfeed, The Ultimate Summer Reading List
Best Book of 2014
– Real Simple
“An honest, staggeringly realized journey . . . Equally funny and touching, the novel strikes deep, presenting a sincere exploration of love and monogamy. These characters are complex, and their story reflects their confusion and desire. . . . An impressive, smart novel.”
– Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Maum’s tale deftly captures a thirtysomething’s sense of grief for the lost passion of youth and the search for something of depth to take its place. Writing with an authentic and affecting vulnerability, Maum considers sentimentality from every possible angle—interpersonal relationships, lofty idealism, and art—and each receives an equally unflinching examination. An unapologetically thoughtful novel told without melodrama and with a lot of heart."
– Booklist
"[A] realistic portrayal of a modern marriage that has lost its way . . . Solid, well-written."
– Library Journal
“Courtney Maum has crafted the story of a relationship so believable, so realistic that readers will be left wondering until the last minute whether the couple will reunite. . . . . The razor-sharp writing and character insights of I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You suggest that readers have much to look forward to from this talented storyteller.”
– BookPage
"Set mainly in Paris, this love story for grown-ups tells the story of a decent man who almost ruins his life and then goes to great lengths to restore his marriage. If your path to a happy marriage has been straight-forward, you may not appreciate this book – but it’s perfect for the rest of us!"
– LibraryReads
“Sometimes a book's characters grab you by the heart and make you ache with understanding and anticipation. You will laugh, wince, and relate as Maum's debut plunges you into a visceral experience with her characters that is both familiar and agonizing. Love, trust, and creative expression are explored as a French lawyer and a British artist grapple with whether love can be rebuilt after betrayal. Gripping!”
– IndieNext
“This book is such a discovery. . . . It’s kind of a love story in reverse. . . . Really gorgeously written.”
– Leigh Haber, O Magazine Books Editor
"A gem of a novel about the tangles of love, regret, and hope that might or might not hold a marriage together. Courtney Maum's deft, beguiling debut charms with its wit and glows with compassion."
– Maggie Shipstead, author of Seating Arrangements
"Courtney Maum writes with such honesty and verve about how we struggle to deserve the people we love. Intensely personal and engagingly complex, I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You is a moving, complicated, big-hearted novel."
– Kevin Wilson, author of The Family Fang
"Antic, sexy, satirically deft, and of course funny, this novel is also, on both the personal and political levels, smart about the bottomlessness of our capacities for self-sabotage, and moving about the fierceness of our yearning to make good."
– Jim Shepard, author of You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway
Resources and Downloads
High Resolution Images
- Book Cover Image (jpg): I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You Trade Paperback 9781476764559
- Author Photo (jpg): Courtney Maum Photograph by Colin Lane(0.1 MB)
Any use of an author photo must include its respective photo credit
