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Atomic Marriage  By  cover art

Atomic Marriage

By: Curtis Sittenfeld
Narrated by: Diane Lane
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Publisher's summary

From New York Times best-selling author Curtis Sittenfeld, a sharp-witted and utterly entertaining audio about the most complicated and compromising partnership there is—marriage.

Academy Award nominee Diane Lane narrates this tale about a Hollywood power broker who travels to Alabama to convince a reluctant author that the studio’s treatment of his best-selling book would make the perfect blockbuster romantic comedy.

What Heather Thiesen knows about marriage is that hers is sputtering, anything but romantic, and utterly exhausting. It’s her job to iron out the details of movie deals with people like Brock Lewis, the self-published and conservative author of Atomic Marriage, even if his preachy rules for a happy, thriving marriage make her want to go back to bed. Harried and married, with a young child at home, she can barely get through the book’s 12-point Atomic Doctrine, let alone follow its advice. Make eye contact with your spouse? Always! Use the bathroom in front of them? Never!

But then she meets Brock. And to her surprise, she likes him—a lot.

Curtis Sittenfeld is one of America’s funniest and most astute cultural commentators. Diane Lane is one of our best leading actresses, sharing Heather’s perspective with depth, candor, and warmth. Together they deliver a remarkable story about the life partners we choose, the secrets we keep, and the compromises we make—or break.

©2018 Curtis Sittenfeld (P)2018 Audible Originals, LLC.

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Publisher's summary

From New York Times best-selling author Curtis Sittenfeld, a sharp-witted and utterly entertaining audio about the most complicated and compromising partnership there is—marriage.

Academy Award nominee Diane Lane narrates this tale about a Hollywood power broker who travels to Alabama to convince a reluctant author that the studio’s treatment of his best-selling book would make the perfect blockbuster romantic comedy.

What Heather Thiesen knows about marriage is that hers is sputtering, anything but romantic, and utterly exhausting. It’s her job to iron out the details of movie deals with people like Brock Lewis, the self-published and conservative author of Atomic Marriage, even if his preachy rules for a happy, thriving marriage make her want to go back to bed. Harried and married, with a young child at home, she can barely get through the book’s 12-point Atomic Doctrine, let alone follow its advice. Make eye contact with your spouse? Always! Use the bathroom in front of them? Never!

But then she meets Brock. And to her surprise, she likes him—a lot.

Curtis Sittenfeld is one of America’s funniest and most astute cultural commentators. Diane Lane is one of our best leading actresses, sharing Heather’s perspective with depth, candor, and warmth. Together they deliver a remarkable story about the life partners we choose, the secrets we keep, and the compromises we make—or break.

©2018 Curtis Sittenfeld (P)2018 Audible Originals, LLC.
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Our favorite moments from Atomic Marriage

You can read the entire thing in under an hour.
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The first three rules of the doctrine
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Eye contact is like Vitamin D...
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  • Atomic Marriage
  • You can read the entire thing in under an hour.
  • Atomic Marriage
  • The first three rules of the doctrine
  • Atomic Marriage
  • Eye contact is like Vitamin D...
Curtis Sittenfeld

About the Author

Curtis Sittenfeld is the best-selling author of the story collection You Think It, I’ll Say It and the novels Prep, The Man of My Dreams, American Wife, and Sisterland, which have been translated into 25 languages. Her nonfiction has been published widely, including in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, and Glamour, and broadcast on public radio's This American Life. A native of Cincinnati, she currently lives with her family in St. Louis.

Diane Lane

About the Performer

Diane Lane’s acting career began at New York City's La MaMa experimental theatre at the age of six, performing in Off-Broadway productions of Chekhov and Greek tragedy before making her movie debut opposite Sir Laurence Olivier in A Little Romance. More film roles followed, but it was her portrayal of a cheating wife in Adrian Lyne's Unfaithful that brought her the most critical acclaim. In addition to winning Best Actress awards from the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Society of Film Critics, Lane was nominated for an Academy Award, a Screen Actors Guild Award, and a Golden Globe.

Her impressive list of credits and co-stars include Under the Tuscan Sun, directed by Audrey Wells and based on the novel by Frances Mayes, Nights in Rodanthe with Richard Gere, Must Love Dogs with John Cusack, A Perfect Storm with George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, and A Walk on the Moon opposite Viggo Mortensen and Liev Schreiber. She received an Emmy nomination for her work in the CBS mini-series Lonesome Dove and Emmy, Golden Globe, and Screen Actors Guild nominations for her role as Pat Loud in the HBO movie, Cinema Verite.

What listeners say about Atomic Marriage

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    1 out of 5 stars

Awful.

Glad it was free. Story went absolutely nowhere and subject matter was rather dumb. Don't mean to be insulting but I wish I had my 58 minutes back

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161 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Enjoyable but lacking any real oomp at the end

In 'Atomic Marriage' we get a glimpse into the lives of two people - Heather, a Hollywood studio exec, and Brock Lewis, a southern pastor and author of a marriage self help book, also called 'Atomic Marriage'. The book has some rules on how to do marriage including daily, weekly, monthly and yearly tasks, as well as rules about do's and don't's around each other.. When a movie studio wants to turn his ultra successful self help book* into a movie about three married couples, all neighbours, who live out the rules in Lewis' book.The studio has decided that to get a better audience share, one of the couples should be gay. Lewis, a traditional southern preacher, is not down with that and it is Heather's job to change his mind.

There is a brief coda, that follows months after the main story, just tying up events and giving some level of closure. But otherwise this story is a single day and a bit in the life of these two people.

(*Side note: please can we stop turning non fiction, no narrative, self help books into movies. Trying to capture the rules, situations and ideas of a self help book through the experiences of a handful of people just doesn't work.)

The attempt to convince Lewis to agree to the movie is a vehicle for a peak into the life of a 'self help guru' (even when that title is not one they chose, but one trust upon them) and into the on-the-brink marriage of Heather. The meeting of these two changes the way Heather sees the author, and how she sees her marriage.

While this is a short story, so we can only expect so much from it in terms of details, there is only two characters ion the book and only one of them feels really fleshed out. We get to know Heather, her history, what she thinks, and how she feels, because we are given insight into her thoughts and memories. We only see Brock Lewis through her and her interactions so we never really get a good idea of who he is, beyond the single day of their meeting. Because of this I feel Lewis get's a bit of a short shift in the story, made to be more of a villain or hypocrite than he really is. Heather doesn't fair much better, in term of appearing as a good person, but we can see her whole thoughts and feelings so it comes across as a more reasoned person.

The whole story is told in 3rd person, present tense. It's a strange style that I don't often see. First person present tense, or third person past tense are common. This is not. Despite being third person, we only really get an insight into Heather's head. So what is gained from the third person view is that the narrator can set the scene and location by pointing out things that Heather may not actively notice. But other than that I'm not sure how much is gained by the point of view choice.

Narration is 3.5 / 5

Narration by Diane Lane is good, but nothing spectacular. She provides southern accent for Brock, although otherwise it's not a significantly different voice, not overly male sounding. The third person narrator and Heather's spoken voice are also differentiated. Lane is well paced, clear and engaging.

There is no sound effects or music or anything added. It's a straight reading of the sort story, which is generally the way I prefer it.

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130 people found this helpful

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POINTLESS BOOK

This book is literally reading a book about a book....the synopsis is misleading. There is HARDLY any marriage talk in this book, mostly just pushing an agenda about homosexuality. Furthermore, we find the main character (married) is desperate to have an affair with a married man...waste of time!

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47 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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Yuck

Don't waste your time. Amazon says the author is "one of America’s funniest and most astute cultural commentators." Believe that with this item, and I tell you about a bridge for sale in Brooklyn. There's nothing astute and I doubt you'll find anything funny--unless you are amused by overdone Alabama accents. If it hadn't been free, I'd be asking for my money book. As it is, I'm sad for the waste of time.

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39 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

More BS making southerners seem inferior to “refined” Hollywood types

Sittenfeld was trying to appear “open” to ideas from dumb southerners, but can we just get a break from hearing the same garbage over and over again? There are good people everywhere, even evangelical “hate mongers”. I can’t even describe how misinformed, ignorant, and close-minded this author is, which comes through in the words she writes. Does everything these days have to be so divisive?

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24 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

simply horrible.

The best thing I can say about this book is thank goodness it was short. I kept waiting for some depth of character to come and rescue it from the garbage pail. Unfortunately that twist never comes. Don't waste your time, as short as it is, with this liberal, virtue signaling, trite, waste of an audible credit.

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    1 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

F bomb first thing

Why do authors no longer have a vocabulary outside the foulest of words. No depth if you have to do this in writing. Supposedly one of the best and newest? Come on

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18 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Good story but didn't need to use the F word 3x

Easy to engage in the story but turned off by the 3 occurrences of the F word. Other, less vulgar words could have been used in its place and still got the point across. Nice variety of other vocabulary though. Would give 4 stars all the way without the profanity.

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16 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

A nice quick escape

I found this story to be surprising, entertaining, and even a little thought provoking. The performer was enjoyable. Easy listening . . . I even laughed out loud a time or two.

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15 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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Liked it

Not sure why a Pastor would be called a HATE MONGER, because of his beliefs on marriage?? If they left that out, It would be 5 stars...

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15 people found this helpful