Author Harrison Scott Key explores his own 'marriage story' in latest memoir

A few days before Easter, Lauren and Harrison Scott Key sat on the porch of their Ardsley Park bungalow, sipped margaritas, and talked about death, resurrection, and the counterintuitive nature of forgiveness.

To say the couple, married 20 years now, had become experts in these hefty topics would be an understatement. Last year, around the time of their nineteenth wedding anniversary in March 2022, both Harrison and Lauren got real in dual Instagram posts that defied the social platform’s typical portraits of perfected #relationshipgoals.

In Lauren’s post, she wrote of how their marriage had died. “We buried it and so many dreams about what our lives would be…”

Harrison warned of “the crucible of suffering that awaits every married couple… We all lost something in the pandemic and what we lost were treasured illusions.”

To those on the periphery of their lives, the candid admissions were shocking, heartbreaking and courageous. To those closest to them, the posts captured the messy, loving community that had gathered ’round and showered them with ceaseless prayer and unearned grace as the couple struggled to keep their family whole.

“It was sad and it was ridiculous and at times even funny, so funny, so wild and unbelievable, everything that happened, that you had to laugh,” wrote Harrison. “Someone could write a book.”

And so, they did.

“How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told” recounts the slow, quiet dissolution of their marriage, Lauren’s infidelity, and Harrison’s reckoning that love is more active verb than vague noun. As they traveled to hell and back — together and separately — they explored the enduring mysteries and of both faith and mercy.

Laughter through tears

Since his first memoir debuted in 2015, Harrison has earned a reputation as a writer of laugh-out-loud humor infused with wry tenderness and depth born from the divide between expectations and reality. In that first book, “The World’s Largest Man,” he mined the territory of manhood by retracing the fraught relationship with his own father. Its essays were both hilarious and aching and earned him the Thurber Prize for American Humor. In his follow-up, “Congratulations, Who Are You Again?”, Harrison is the proverbial dog that caught the parked car, exploring the distance between the idea of the long-held dream and the reality of finally achieving it. In both books, Lauren and their three daughters serve as foils and teachers, as Harrison tries to make sense of his life while also making readers laugh.

“I’ve always been funny and never understood why I was funny or how I was funny or why people laugh, but it was the thing that always brought me joy. It was the way I moved through the world,” Harrison reflected.

But while Harrison was on his way to becoming, Lauren was on her way out the door. Although humor and laughter always had been the currency of their marriage, Lauren felt she was living a different experience than her husband.

Defense mechanisms perfected since childhood — independence, dependability, service, stoicism — kept her from sharing her deepest longings and resolving the profound grief of her father’s abandonment and her mother’s death from cancer just days before their 2003 wedding.

“I was a people pleaser,” said Lauren. “I wanted to get along. I wanted to be easy… I knew if I shared or opened up, or even cried in front of people that that would be so vulnerable. It just didn’t feel safe, and you can’t let people in.”

Harrison described his own approach to those early years of marriage as being on autopilot. “I think I always thought, you just kind of go along, it’ll be fine. Like, she’ll adapt to me. I guess I’ll adapt to her. We’ll adapt to children… It doesn’t really require maintenance if you don’t just f*@k up too much.”

But what they both learned “though our implosion” is how hard marriage really is even when it looks great on paper.

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Through hell and back

In “How to Stay Married,” Harrison captures the harrowing details of that implosion with the precision of a battlefield memoir mixed with a surprising amount of humility and humor. Whereas many people would call it quits at the first signs of cheating, he switches from autopilot to manual control, taking responsibility for his own shortcomings as a husband and father, something he says he was able to do because he had written those first two books.

“For me, telling the story is a way to understand what happened. Most people think that something interesting happens and then you tell a story about it. For me, it was more like, everything is interesting because I’m so confused by it all. And so, writing was a way for me to fix meaning, almost literally, on the page.”

Much of that meaning comes through the spiritual journey that runs through the book, which is both deep and hilarious as Harrison explores scripture in the age of social media.

The couple left the big rule-bound church that had been their home since they had moved to Savannah for a small, independent faith community that embraced them, warts and all, without judgment and shame. There, they experienced that difference between justice and mercy that is the cornerstone of New Testament theology and the universal Christ’s message.

“My natural disposition is I want to punish people for breaking testaments,” said Harrison. “If you’ve ever played a board game with me and you tweak the rules, I will come down on you like Abraham, or Moses-style. That’s just my natural disposition.

“But the faith that I grew up with is very counter to that. The idea of you forgive your brother not seven times, but 70 times seven times. Like, that’s a joke in the Bible. It’s a hyperbole. And the joke is, you will have to forgive so many times it will feel ridiculous.”

They also sought marriage counseling, which is where Lauren finally started sharing the emotions, feelings and concerns she had bottled up all those years. The counselor encouraged her to journal, and it was “like taking the cap off a little bit.”

That’s when Harrison broached the idea of writing a book about their marriage and including a chapter from Lauren’s point of view in the book. “He was welcoming me back. This is our marriage. This is our story.”

Lauren enjoyed the therapeutic aspects of the writing process but admits to moments of vacillating between worrying what people will think after reading it and giving no thought to the gossipers and naysayers. “It if makes one person’s marriage better, then great, I’m all for it.”

They are preparing for whatever comes as a result of publishing “How to Stay Married,” whether that be the judgment of others or being cast as experts on marriage, neither of which is the goal. Learning how to love is the process, and it’s a lesson they relearn daily.

They continue to attend counseling sessions once a month, where they make space for the things that come up but don’t get tended to in the busyness of life.

“Every marriage has stuff in the closet that needs to be flushed out,” Lauren said. “We’re good. I think it definitely feels fresh and new but not in a silly, surface-y kind of way… not like we just started dating, butterfly-kind-of new. I think we learned that we had gotten into a lot of bad habits and, if we were going to stay married, then there was going to have to be some newness to it, some new habits.”

Book Launch

“How to Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told” by Harrison Scott Key

WHEN: 6:30 p.m., June 11

WHERE: Service Brewing, 574 Indian St.

Info: E. Shaver Booksellers

This is a ticketed event. The authors will sign books following a presentation and Q&A session.

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah author Harrison Scott Key explores How to Stay Married in latest book