With a clarity that cuts through the confusion surrounding much of society's thinking about modern marriage, Anne Roiphe offers an unfettered view of an institution which continues to play an important role in all our lives;We live in a world where the concept of getting married is an unfashionable one. Where individuals protest their independence, their inability to commit or their lack of faith in the institution, against a culture of bestsellers, films, television and magazines all obsessed with the finding, and keeping, of a mate.With clarity Anne Roiphe gives us an unfettered view of an institution which continues to play an important role in all our lives. In doing so she offers an elegant defence of married life from the perspective of a wife and mother who has survived the fifties, the sexual revolution and the women's movement. Drawing on personal anecdote, history, literature and popular culture, "Married" explores romantic love, the importance of divorce, the pressures of parenthood, infidelity and its temptations, the changing roles of men and women, and the troubled state of modern courtship. The result is a moving tribute not only to what marriage asks of us, but also

From National Book Award nominee Anne Roiphe comes this moving memoir of growing up in a wealthy Jewish home with a family who had money, status, culture -- everything but happiness.

While the nation was at war abroad, Roiphe, who was coming of age in 1940s New York City, saw her parents at war in their living room. Roiphe's evocative writing puts readers right in Apartment 8C, where a constant tension plays out between a disappointed and ineffectual mother, a philandering father who uses his wife's money to entertain other women, and a difficult brother. Behind the leisure culture of wealthy Jewish society -- the mahjongg games, the cocktail parties, the summer houses -- lurks a brutality that strikes a chord with a daughter who longs to heal the wounds of her troubled family.

Writing with a novelist's sensibility, Roiphe reveals the poignant story of a family that has finally claimed its material wealth in a prosperous America but has yet to claim its spiritual due.