Anyone who has read Ten Thousand Saints, Eleanor Henderson's first novel, may recognize her husband, Aaron, in her enthralling and devastating memoir, Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage. In it, Henderson says of writing Ten Thousand Saints, "For nine years I had been building a fictional universe out of the scraps of [Aaron's] childhood"; the story she crafted was "the one I wished for him." Everything I Have Is Yours contains Aaron's true story, and no one would wish it on anybody.
Throughout the 20-plus years bridging Henderson and Aaron's courtship and the Covid-19 pandemic, the vast majority of their time seems to have been spent seeking diagnoses and remedies for Aaron's medical problems. "Aaron describes his symptoms, a song he's long ago memorized. Anemic. Disoriented. Falling. Can't concentrate. Can't sleep. The flare every two weeks. The skin crawling. The stuff coming out of his hands." To introduce themselves at a Recovering Couples Anonymous retreat, Henderson and Aaron recap "the drugs, the suicide attempts, the childhood abuse, separation, recovery." Understandably, Aaron is often unable to hold a job, so he and Henderson get by, sometimes barely, with family money and her income, ultimately as a teacher at Ithaca College.
Perhaps particularly unsettling, and certainly humbling, Everything I Have Is Yours may prompt readers to consider whether they would have Henderson's fortitude to stick with her unceasingly difficult marriage. Her memoir has aspects of medical mystery and horror story, but most readers will leave it with the impression of having taken in a love story as blisteringly beautiful as it is truthful. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer