Title: For better, for worse
Description: What really happens to marriage when children enter the picture? For Better, For Worse is a riveting chronicle af this common and often disconcerting experience. In an intimite narrative that penetrates the last sanctum of private life, Susan Squire follows five couples from the first surreal weeks of pregnancy through the end of the postpartum year. The couples range in age from their mid-twenties to their mid-forties. Although their backgrounds are diverse, their struggles and triumphs are emblematic of the juggling act that defines the state of contemporary middle-class parenthood. Through Squire's tenacious reporting and novelist's eye for detail, we come to know these men and women better than we know ourselves: the husband with a chronic distrust of doctors whose wife's pregnancy requires constant medical surveillance; the career woman who must battle with the guilty knowledge that while returning to work is the right choice for her, it may not be so for her infant; the anxiety of the successful, egotistical lawyer who, at forty-five, is forced to confront his mortality because of the baby growing in his wife's body; the stay-at-home mother of two, whose hardworking husband yearns to trade places - and frustrations - with her; the postpartum ambivalence about sex (which, surprisingly, affects the husbands as much as the wives) ... Squire's evocative writing puts us squarely in the middle of the couples' fights and hopes and dreams as they adapt to their reconfigured lives. How do "family values" hold up in these stressful times, when father no longer knows best and mother is on the road? For Better, For Worse will take you on an eye-opening, suspenseful journey behind closed doors, and give you some unexpected answers along the way. This is journalism at its most readable and compassionate, a report from the front lines of late twentieth-century reality.
Subjects: Case studies, Marriage, Parenthood
Places: United States