"Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages"

02/10/23 • 21 min

5 Listeners

Admit it: It's fun to look at other people's marriages — and all the more fun if those marriages are messy. In a new group biography, "Lives of the Wives: Five Literary Marriages," the author Carmela Ciuraru peers into some relationships that are very messy indeed: the tumultuous marriages of Kenneth Tynan and Elaine Dundy; Roald Dahl and Patricia Neal; Kingsley Amis and Elizabeth Jane Howard; Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge; and Alberto Moravia and Elsa Morante. As Ciuraru's title suggests, the book focuses especially on the role — and toll — of being a wife, stifling one's own creative impulses for the sake of a temperamental artist.

On this week's podcast, Sadie Stein — an editor at the Book Review, who commissioned the literary critic Hermione Hoby to write about Ciuraru's book for us — talks with the host Gilbert Cruz about "Lives of the Wives."

"They're all complicated people," Stein says. "I don't want to oversimplify it. Everyone knows you can't see inside anyone else's marriage. But these couples, you can see a little more. And in some cases, a little more than maybe you want to."

"It's a very gossipy book," Cruz says. "And I, to my own embarrassment, was not as up on 20th-century European literary gossip as maybe I should have been. So a lot of this stuff came as a total surprise, total shock to me. ... It's so juicy, but it also made me feel bad in a certain way."

And that, we can all agree, is good.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

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And that, we can all agree, is good.

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Previous Episode

A Look Ahead at the Season's Big Books

How do you define a "big book"? It might be a new offering from a beloved author or a deep dive into a timely subject or a story that has generated unusual enthusiasm among editors and other early readers: One way or another, these are the books that build "buzz" and create momentum in the weeks and months before their publication. On this week's podcast, the Book Review's editor, Gilbert Cruz, talks with Tina Jordan, the deputy editor, about the books they're most looking forward to this season, including new fiction from Salman Rushdie, Eleanor Catton and Victor LaValle, and nonfiction from Matthew Desmond, Claire Dederer and David Grann.

Among other things, Cruz and Jordan discuss cancel culture, spoilers from "Macbeth" and the concept of what's known in publishing circles as a "make book."

"A 'make book' is a book a publisher has usually, although not always, spent a great deal of money for and earmarked a lot of money for a marketing campaign," Jordan says. "In other words, they are going to get the news out about this book. You are going to hear about it."

The books discussed on this week's podcast are:

"Victory City," by Salman Rushdie

"Birnam Wood," by Eleanor Catton

"Pineapple Street," by Jenny Jackson

"Poverty by America," by Matthew Desmond

"Lone Women," by Victor LaValle

"Monsters," by Claire Dederer

"The Wager," by David Grann

"The Covenant of Water," by Abraham Verghese

"Oscar Wars," by Michael Schulman

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Next Episode

Public Libraries, and Profiling Paul Harding

At a time when public libraries and librarians are facing budget headwinds and sometimes intense political scrutiny for the roles they play in their communities, the Times photo editor Erica Ackerberg last fall dispatched photographers to seven libraries in cities, suburbs and rural areas across the country to document what daily life in those public institutions really looks like in today's world. The resulting photographs, published this week with an accompanying essay by the Book Review editor Elisabeth Egan, revealed libraries to be essential community centers and far more than the hushed and beloved book depositories you may remember from your childhood. On this week's podcast, Egan and Ackerberg talk to the host Gilbert Cruz about how their article came together, and what libraries mean in their lives and in society at large.

"Books are what draw you to the library, but there are so many other things happening there that have nothing to do with books," Egan says. "The modern library encompasses 20 other things based on the needs of its community. ... What the library needs shows you what the community it's in is all about."

Ackerberg says: "I was actually thinking about one of the libraries, the Northtown Library in Chicago — they call themselves an 'intergenerational community hub,' and I felt like that kind of sums up all these libraries. Every generation, and everybody from all communities are welcome there, and hang out there, and spend time there. It's a warm place to be."

Also this week, MJ Franklin, an editor at the Book Review, talks to Cruz about his recent profile of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Paul Harding, whose new book is "This Other Eden."

"What I was interested in was, What is Paul Harding up to now?" Franklin says. "What is his writing process? He has such a distinctive and singular voice, that I wanted to get closer to that."

We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].

Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.