But You Seemed So Happy

In this tender, funny, and sharp companion to heracclaimed memoir-in-essays Amateur Hour, Kimberly Harrington exploresand confronts marriage, divorce, and the ways love, loss, and longing shape alife.

Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced theirdivorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be aboutdivorce — heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance.After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage they hadchosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in aglobal pandemic and her idea of what the end of a marriage should look and feellike was flipped even further on its head.

This originally dark and caustic exploration turned into amore empathetic exercise, as she worked to understand what this relationshipmeant and why marriage matters so much. Over the course of two years of whatwas supposed to be a temporary period of transition, she sifted through herpast—how she formed her ideas about relationships, sex, marriage, and divorce.And she dug back into the history of her marriage — how she and her futureex-husband had met, what it felt like to be madly in love, how they had changedover time, the impact having children had on their relationship, and what theystill owed one another.

But You Seemed So Happy is a time capsule of sorts.It’s about getting older and repeatedly dying on the hill of being wiser, onlyto discover you were never all that dumb to begin with. It’s an honest,intimate biography of a marriage, from its heady, idealistic, and easybeginnings to it slowly coming apart and finally to its evolution intosomething completely unexpected. As she probes what it means when everyone assumesyou’re happy as long as you’re still married, Harrington skewers engagementphotos, Gen X singularity, small-town busybodies, and the casual way we makelife-altering decisions when we’re young. Ultimately, this moving and funnymemoir in essays is a vulnerable and irreverent act of forgiveness—ofourselves, our partners, and the relationships that have run their course butwill always hold profound and permanent meaning in our lives.

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