Heather Havrilesky is the first to admit that she's a handful. "I'm bossy and moody and very demanding" cautioned the then-34-year-old Los Angeles TV critic and advice columnist ("Ask Polly") in one of the first e-mails she exchanged with Bill, a tenured professor with his own shortcomings (constant throat clearings, abysmal long-term memory). Havrilesky and Bill got hitched anyway. Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage is Havrilesky's crotchety, squalling and frequently hilarious 15-years-in effort to understand "why I signed myself up for the world's most impossible endurance challenge."
Foreverland chugs along entertainingly enough until the book's final stretch, when the tedium that readers know to expect from the subtitle is shaken by darker developments. Actually, a more accurate subtitle for Foreverland might be On the Divine Tedium of Family Life. Havrilesky (deliberately) gets pregnant as soon as she and Bill are engaged, and she writes with bluntness and brio about the tribulations of parenthood: "The baby lands like a bomb in the middle of your life and lays waste to everything." Though the domestic juggling act isn't new ground in a memoir, Havrilesky (What If This Were Enough?) is a writer punchy and resourceful enough to make ordinary family trials (a bad road trip, recalcitrant dogs and kids, a buttinsky grandmother) seem as though they've only ever happened to her. In one blistering comic set piece, Havrilesky choreographs her daughter's talent show dance to Rachel Platten's "Fight Song," which she describes as "the sonic version of a one-thousand-year-long noogie." --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer