SummaryNo one blends humor and heartbreak like Rita Ciresi, whose
award-winning novels are lauded as much for their generous
wit as for their unflinching honesty. Ciresi's crowd-
pleasing novel Pink Slip captivated readers and critics
alike, introducing two utterly unforgettable characters and
a love story both bittersweet and comic. Now Ciresi returns
to the people and place of that irresistible bestseller in
a riotous and rueful, sexy and poignant tale of married
love...a novel that asks how two people who fell
desperately,
passionately, heartbreakingly in love can sustain a second
act. It's Valentine's Day, and Lisa Strauss, nee Diodetto, is
spending it playing dutiful wife at a $100-a-head benefit
instead of in bed with Eben, her hardworking husband of (is
it only?) five years. Once upon a time, Lisa, too, was a
member of the corporate workaday world--until she fell in
love with her boss (Eben), gave birth to a cute but
rambunctious son, and gradually morphed into a stay-at-home
mom. Somewhere in the mix Lisa also is a writer with
ambitions of fame and glory, but those dreams seem to be
shrinking, along with her sex life. That is, until a
hotshot literary agent shows interest in Lisa's magnum opus. Suddenly, she has a pen name, and an excerpt of her book
appears in Playboy. In between revising chapters, Lisa is
trying--and failing miserably--to get pregnant again. She's
going house-hunting with Cynthia Farquhar, the gorgeous
blond Realtor/divorcee who has become her closest
confidante (and the object of Eben's secret fantasies). And
she's wondering if this is all marriage is and can ever be:
bonded for life to a man who may never again be the red-hot
lover of their pre-marriage union. In fact, he just may
turn out to be the conflicted protagonist of her novel--a
devoted family man whose moral fiber may not be strong
enough to withstand the slings and arrows of lust and
temptation. As their lives begin to bizarrely mirror
aspects of Lisa's book...as marital life as they know it
teeters on the edge of utter chaos, Lisa and Eben search--
apart and together--for the answer to the question that has
plagued husbands and wives since time immemorial: Can love
survive marriage? In a wickedly funny, right-on-target look at love and
relationships, Rita Ciresi peels back the layers of a
marriage with equal doses of hilarity and humanity. Filled
with all the zest, zingers, and unexpected surprises of
life, Remind Me Again Why I Married You is this uncommonly
gifted author at her lusty and liberating best.
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