Falling: The Story of One Marriage

Taylor (Storming the Magic Kingdom) has written an eloquent and deeply felt memoir about the demise of his 11-year marriage. Taylor married his wife when he was 26 and she was 32, after they had been living together for more than a year. Almost immediately their marriage underwent a severe strain when his wife was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease, which made her subsequent pregnancy fraught with anxiety for both of them. Although Taylor was delighted by the birth of his daughter, the years following were marked by a slow but progressive breakdown in communication between husband and wife. Taylor felt that his wife became resentful at her dependency on him, and, as their estrangement grew, he coped by having an affair and later moving out. The couple made several attempts to salvage the marriage for the sake of their daughter, and Taylor sensitively conveys his grief over the failure of these efforts. Clearly, neither Taylor nor his wife embarked on the path of divorce lightly, and Taylor manages to convey the sense of loss he will always feel without sounding sorry for himself. While this is an overwhelmingly personal book, Taylor does take a few well-aimed shots at family-values pundits who decry the ""divorce culture"" and view divorce as a failure of moral will. ""While it requires will to make a marriage work,"" Taylor writes, ""it also requires a horrifying act of will to bring one to an end."" Author tour. (Feb.)