Memoir reveals humorist’s painful marital secrets | DON NOBLE

Harrison Scott Key is a professional memoirist. Readers watch his life move along from book to book. This is not to say that he does things in his life in order to write about them, but whatever happens, he is now compelled, for a number of reasons, to put down on paper.

His first book, "The World's Largest Man" (2015), tells of growing up in rural Mississippi with a stern father who wanted him to be a “regular” boy — interested in football, hunting and fishing. Key was not that boy. Key was interested in books and even when he tried, he could not be like or please his father who, he says, taught him "how to kill things with guns and knives and, if necessary, with hammers."

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He would eventually earn a Ph.D. and become a college professor.

His recalling of that childhood was a huge success, a bestseller, won the Thurber Prize for American Humor, and put him on a grueling, extensive promotion tour around America.

His second book is essentially about that tour and the difficult and absurd situations an author must cope with moving from city to city, bookstore to bookstore for months.

In both books Key discusses his powerful drive to be a successful author. He writes daily, relentlessly. And he likes to write in Waffle Houses and coffee shops, not at home. It is clear that his wife, of necessity, is doing most of the household chores and child-raising while he becomes rich and famous.

“How to Stay Married,” his third installment, continues the biographical story but opens with a shocking surprise.

Key’s wife suddenly announces to him she wants a divorce, is in love with a neighbor, his friend, and has been for quite some time.

Key is shocked, surprised, horrified. He loves her and admires her many talents and virtues. He cannot imagine life without her. There are options. One is to accept the divorce, let her go, and adjust to shared custody of the children.

Another option, not entirely out of the question considering his boyhood, is to allow a kind of feral self to take command and beat or shoot her, and the lover who, for reasons known only to him, Key calls “Chad."

A third option: try to figure out what happened and somehow save the marriage.

He consults the pastor of a large mainstream Protestant church who suggests threatening his wife with shaming and shunning and excommunication as if Savannah, Georgia, were a medieval village. He finds real wisdom and comfort in a small, new church group and he moves toward forgiveness, but first he must understand which part of the problem was his fault.

Where did communication break down? Was he absent, negligent, distant? He had been chronically depressed, also a "clinical" over-eater, now verging on obese. And how did he fail to notice the absence of intimacy, the "zero touching?"

He also comes to understand the effects of earlier trauma on his wife. "Her heart had become a slaughterhouse of death and pain." Her pastor father deserted the family, leaving them humiliated and in poverty. Her mother died of cancer just days before her wedding.

And, for Key, understanding his life can come only through writing honestly about it. He says of his own writing: "My highest virtue has always been radical transparency, to a fault: The book you are holding is proof of that."

The book is truthful, for sure. Many readers will think that secrets like these should not be made public. The memoirist feels he must.

But he is, as mentioned, a humorist, and there are plenty of wry, ironic witticisms in this story — adultery humor, we might call it.

Key is also, it seems, an artist at describing human suffering. “In addition to going insane you will feel pain that transcends all prior experience. Pain that burns away the sky.” That is just the start of it.

The whole process, incredibly, takes about five years. There is, to say the least, unsteady progress. Most of his friends finally tell him to give up, let her go.

But he does not and they are, today, a couple that has an excellent chance of growing old together.

Don Noble’s newest book is Alabama Noir, a collection of original stories by Winston Groom, Ace Atkins, Carolyn Haines, Brad Watson, and eleven other Alabama authors.

“How To Stay Married: The Most Insane Love Story Ever Told”

Author: Harrison Scott Key

Publisher: Avid Reader Press

Pages: 288

Price: $27.99 (Hardcover)

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Memoir reveals humorist’s painful marital secrets | DON NOBLE