... her book..skates a wonderful line between being refreshingly and brutally honest about the challenges of marriage ... Foreverland is above all deeply relatable ... At one level, Foreverland fulfills a basic and important function of telling the truth to many unsuspecting future customers of marriage. I wish someone had told me these things ... Havrilesky’s portrayal of the gritty underside of marriage is honest and searing. Accepting it as it truly is allows her to find the real romance ... The truth is much more interesting.

The title and subtitle of her newest memoir-cum- wry social commentary say it all ...A frank look at just how tiresome and lackluster (but ultimately rewarding!) marriage can be ...What works: Havrilesky’s neurotic, self-deprecating sense of humor is always on display and adds a comedic twist on universal themes, such as straying and what to do about your spouse’s excessively loud bodily functions. What doesn’t: At times, this same wit can seem acerbic, or worse, whiny. Her extended rant about suburbanites seems a smidge harsh, not to mention dated, for my taste ...Nonetheless, Havrilesky’s metaphors are reason alone to pick up the book.

Foreverland,...is dedicated simply 'To Bill,' the husband of Heather Havrilesky, its author, who pays him this brief honor as a prelude to writing endlessly about his flaws ... This seemingly one-sided bargain is worth noting because it is typical of the relationship at the very center of the story, a marriage between a neurotic perfectionist and a formidably patient man with much to criticize about him ... That the author has made her particular disgusts...the basis for a general treatise on matrimony is the abiding problem of Foreverland. How well can an institution be explained by a single instance of it, and especially by one beset with problems that aren’t necessarily widely shared? Quite well, Havrilesky seems to feel, or else she wouldn’t start so many sentences with sweeping prefaces such as 'Marriage is' or 'Having a baby means' or 'The suburbs are' followed by blanket statements of what they are ... She is...amusingly sarcastic ... I know only my own marriage, like her, and I prefer to hide its nuttier moments. Marriage is — for myself and others — a secret ... 'The suburbs are a place where people go to embrace the dominant paradigm, because the dominant paradigm makes them feel safe and comfortable.' A dominant paradigm? In today’s America? As often happens in the book, Havrilesky’s big wedding being an example, the paradigm here is in the author’s head and those of her specific cohort and feels decidedly anachronistic, like a cultish tribute to traditions that allegedly dominated once ... I suppose that’s the point — the suburbs are clichéd — but so is complaining about them in this fashion. Havrilesky, to her credit, says as much, but then she barrels forward anyway ... This attraction to the categorical, this yearning for the definitive broad statement, is unfortunate in a writer whose signal gift is for mordant, close-up descriptive prose ... One of the book’s best episodes involves a chaotic last-minute cross-country road trip of too many miles and too few bathrooms ... It’s a bravado feat of family portraiture: savage, tender, claustrophobic ... But what is marriage? A paradox. This seems to be Havrilesky’s final answer, but she gives it up front and repeats it along the way ... That she feels it’s especially exemplary in an age of careening domestic improvisation is somewhat mysterious and cause for argument.

Have I got a book for you! Heather Havrilesky’s new memoir, Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage, is a wise, witty, profane, even profound, meditation on her 15-year marriage ... Sometimes in this latest book her writing bogs down or turns purple when she tries to link one chapter to the next to propel the story forward. She needn’t have worried. Her voice is so engaging, and her comic timing so impeccable, that she turns the 'divine tedium' of her marriage into a rollicking adventure for her readers, too.

You’d be justified in taking Foreverland as an unwitting indictment of hetero marriage, the nuclear family, the whole catastrophe. Havrilesky, the longtime author of the advice column 'Ask Polly,' makes the milestones of white-picket-fence life sound miserable ... But for every complaint...there are some exquisitely simple moments of recognition ... She won’t settle for one descriptor when she can have six. The prose tumbles out in helpless run-ons, earnest asyndeton ... Recounting their lives together, she overextends her metaphors so far it’s like she’s hoping to hear the joints pop ... Havrilesky won’t win over everyone with her high-saturation comic style. But to readers receptive to that kind of swashbuckling bluster...the sheer effort of her prose is a kind of valentine.

...wise and mordant ... Unlike the many memoirs that double as thinly veiled advertisements for their authors, Foreverland ventures occasionally unflattering honesty, not just about Bill but also about its author. Havrilesky is unafraid to admit to nursing unseemly sentiments that most of us would go to great lengths to conceal ... What Havrilesky’s bevy of detractors overlook is the rather manifest fact that she is joking. Readers familiar with her exuberant 'Ask Polly' advice column know that she tends toward playful, wordy relentlessness, and in Foreverland she relies on the same sort of hyperbole to deflate widespread idealization of the romantic dyad ... Occasionally, Havrilesky’s maximalist prose can be grating, too. She favors long, unwieldy sentences and cavalcades of metaphors that can be mixed to the point of confusion ... But, for the most part, Foreverland displays a formidable emotional intelligence despite its chatty tone—and because, in part, of its extravagant rhetoric ... a tender book, full of touching descriptions of falling and staying in love, even in the face of the profound frustrations that inevitably spring from prolonged interpersonal contact ... not a book that will appeal to everyone, largely because Havrilesky, or at least her narratorial avatar, is not especially likable ... Reading Foreverland is good practice in learning to love a person who can be difficult and demanding.

... funny, sweet, romantic, deeply honest ... a testament to the complexities of marriage as explored via Havrilesky’s particular union. The sweeping statements Havrilesky throws into the mix, such as 'marriage is a spectacle, and everyone is invited to watch,' are more like hypotheticals drawn from her life about to be explored, rather than declarations of iron laws ... Havrilesky has always done her thinking on the page, and a number of times you will see her at the end of a chapter amending a view shared at the beginning. This is the pleasure of reading her.

With marriage increasingly rare and pandemic-fueled divorce on the rise, it might seem, well, inopportune to devote an entire tome to the merits and mysteries of matrimony. Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage approaches the task with equal parts curiosity, humor and disarming candor, rejecting the platitudes with which so many of us (especially women) have long been bombarded ... Both a possible draw and setback, Foreverland's second half is more devoted to what it’s like to rear small children with an active male spouse than an exploration of marriage outright. So, too, does the book orbit specifically hetero wedlock and acknowledge the gendered inequities that invariably result no matter how progressive the couple ... Havrilesky recounts her own experience of lockdown, throwing into relief how the conditions of quarantine both exacerbated preexisting marital tensions and revealed the extent to which she and her husband relied on and nurtured each other — a fact made even more crucial by her breast cancer scare. Even then, the author retains a penchant for scathing assessments.

A collection of essays on marriage that achieves the impossible ... She walks the tightrope here, unflinching in her appraisal, indulgent in her praise. Somehow, she manages to condemn the restaurant while still convincing you of its tremendous worth. The book is a delight; it is a magic trick. It is also terrifically funny ... Woven through each essay is a chronological reflection on the author’s experience of being a woman, being a girlfriend, then a wife and a mother, none of which is easy ... Havrilesky’s intense candor and the occasional (okay, regular) use of profanity may turn some readers off, but others will find her tone just the right blend of tenderness and irreverence.

Many chapters in Foreverland feature an unmet expectation, a misunderstanding, a meltdown and an event that is likened to a bomb exploding ... Perhaps because of her day job as a dispenser of wise counsel, Ms. Havrilesky is well-versed in the minutiae of bad behavior, poor judgment and hurt feelings and very good at summoning words of encouragement and exhortation—sardonic, sympathetic, profane, stern, as needed ... Alas, Foreverland is on shaky ground with its very premise—that scenes from one marriage elucidate marriage in general, though some readers may welcome the chance to compare their relationship with the author’s. The opening chapter sets the pace for a parade of specious declarations along such lines ... It’s not precisely that Foreverland breaches some code of matrimonial omerta. Married people complain about their spouses all the time—to their friends, to their therapists, to strangers on a train. But they—we—know where to draw a line. The line is at phlegm and at publication. This isn’t clutch-my-pearls moralizing; this is manners ... Ms. Havrilesky seems to want to have it every which way: to highlight her husband’s leakages in the interests of full disclosure and rack up points for candor while labeling as 'holier-than-thou' readers who would find fault with such tales out of school. It all makes Ms. Havrilesky a decidedly unsympathetic narrator. And it makes her as tedious—if not divinely—as marriage reportedly can be. For the record, she dedicates Foreverland to Bill. I can’t wait to read his book.

Havrilesky knows that if love is anything, it is also tolerant and grateful, sexy and companionable. Most of all, it is a state not to be taken for granted. Newlyweds, nearlyweds, and golden-anniversary celebrants alike will find much that is familiar, inspiring, and comforting in Havrilesky’s clear-eyed paean to marital bliss and blunders.

Deliciously sardonic ... While she writes movingly about her love for her husband, Bill, more poignant are her darkly funny ruminations on the way that 'the world’s most impossible endurance challenge' can put even the strongest relationships on trial ... With acerbic humor and keen wit, Havrilesky explores the complicated emotions associated with major milestones in her life ... No matter the joke or metaphor, palpable within each story is her love for her family...and the friends who’ve helped her along the way. Havrilesky’s candid reflections will delight those who’ve taken the plunge, for better or for worse.

Havrilesky honestly serves up her own flaws for the reader’s perusal ... Meanwhile, Bill comes off quite well, though the author describes his annoying habits in perhaps too much detail. There are times when Havrilesky’s interest in writing ambitious prose or making a metaphor work get in the way of her narrative, but overall, this is a delightfully quirky memoir that refreshingly dissects the institution of marriage. An engaging, candid, relatable memoir of love and marriage.