But You Seemed So Happy

A Marriage, in Pieces and Bits

By: Kimberly Harrington

Narrated by: Xe Sands

Length: 7 hrs and 10 mins

Publisher's summary

In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to her acclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington explores and confronts marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss, and longing shape a life.

Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced their divorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be about divorce - heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a 20-year marriage they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in a global pandemic and her idea of what the end of a marriage should look and feel like was flipped even further on its head.

This originally dark and caustic exploration turned into a more empathetic exercise, as she worked to understand what this relationship meant and why marriage matters so much. Over the course of two years of what was supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through her past - how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce. And she dug back into the history of her marriage - how she and her future ex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they had changed over time, the impact having children had on their relationship, and what they still owed one another.

But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts. It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, only to discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest, intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easy beginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution into something completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumes you’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagement photos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we make life-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funny memoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness - of ourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course but will always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.

©2021 Kimberly Harrington (P)2021 HarperCollins Publishers

Loved it - relatable, tender and funny

I think this is a book that you need to be “in it” or at least contemplating divorce to appreciate the tenderness, candor and insights provided here. What if you feel the marriage chapter is complete yet there are no high drama reasons to separate or divorce? I like this option - mainly I like the main premise - find what works for you and don’t buy into another society norm - normalizing the end of a relationship could go a long way to maintain the mental health and well being of all of those involved. Thank you Kimberly for writing and Xe for narrating! I appreciated both of you and this book very much!

Normalize Becoming Unmarried

I love hearing about her process and mixed feelings about a super layered, complicated, emotional topic of seperation and eventual divorce. I feel like what she shares is normal, relevant, and sometimes funny. I like that she talks about being in a marriage and loving someone who is normal yet dispite their efforts are just no longer compatible but still recognizes the good qualities he has regardless of her feelings. I agree with her and dispise the social norm that when someone mentions divorce they immediately think you must hate the other person or they did something. It would be less tramatic for adults and children if becoming unmarried were a normal process.

Contrived

This was SO hard to get through. I was looking for something relatable and ended up with a story I honestly could not care about one bit. Oh poor you; your husband worships you but your too selfish and spoiled to see it until after you’ve found out nobody else wants you. This was a complete waste of time and a credit! Between the author and the narrator I BEGGED for this story to be over!

An hour's worth of material in seven

I read an essay about this book and ran out to buy it. Little did I know that the only interesting part of the book had already been covered. The author has one interesting nugget: she is getting divorced and still living with her husband, and she came up with an interesting title. But, that was it. There is no insight, no drama, and very little material to work with. When out of ideas the author simply writes pages and pages of rhetorical questions or adds irrelevant details about her you. Boring.