A serious new book from the planet’s least serious writer
How to Stay Married tells the hilarious, shocking, and spiritually profound story of one man’s journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage.
Purchase on Amazon, Indiebound, and Simon & Schuster. Buy the audiobook (performed by HSK!) here.
One gorgeous autumn day, Harrison discovers that his wife—the sweet, funny, loving mother of their three daughters, a woman “who’s spent just about every Sunday of her life in a church”—is having an affair with a family friend. This revelation propels the hysterical, heartbreaking action of How to Stay Married, casting our narrator onto “the factory floor of hell,” where his wife was now in love with a man who “wears cargo shorts, on purpose.” What will he do? Kick her out? Set fire to all her panties in the yard? Beat this man to death with a gardening implement? Ask God for help in winning her back?
Armed with little but a sense of humor and a hunger for the truth, Harrison embarks on a hellish journey into his past, seeking answers to the riddles of faith and forgiveness. Through an absurd series of escalating confessions and betrayals, Harrison reckons with his failure to love his wife in the ways she needed most, resolves to fight for his family, and in a climax almost too ridiculous to be believed, finally learns that love is no joke. How to Stay Married is a comic romp unlike any in contemporary literature, a wild Pilgrim’s Progress through the hellscape of marriage and the mysteries of mercy.
photo by chia chong
Harrison Scott Key is the author of How to Stay Married, Congratulations, Who Are You Again?, and The World's Largest Man, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor. His first TEDx talk went viral among a certain demographic. If you’d like Harrison to speak at your event, he will probably do it in exchange for money. Just ask him!
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Harrison's humor and nonfiction have appeared in The Best American Travel Writing, Oxford American, Outside, The New York Times, The Bitter Southerner, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, Town & Country, The Mockingbird, Salon, Savannah Magazine, Reader's Digest, Image, Southern Living, Gulf Coast, and Creative Nonfiction, as well as a number of magazines that don't pay you anything at all, not even a little, but it was cool, because people who work at magazines are mostly poor, and helping the poor is a priority for Harrison, should he come under scrutiny.
Be Instapals with Harrison on InstantGram!
Harrison has lectured, talked, read, performed, etc., around the world, at book festivals, bookstores, conferences (for design, writing, religion, medicine, real estate, education), variety shows, radio shows, and universities, as well as one retirement community whose members were perfectly courteous up until the end. He has also performed standup comedy at venues around the U.S., if you include three or four different cities to be "around the U.S."
Be enemies with Harrison on Twitter!
He holds an M.F.A. in creative nonfiction and a Ph.D. in playwriting and has worked at SCAD for quite literally thousands of years, where he’s held appointments as chair of liberal arts, professor of English, professor of writing, and executive dean. He lives in Savannah, Georgia, with three children and one wife.
If you would like Harrison to sign a book, call one of the two independent bookstores in Savannah—call Joni at The Book Lady (912-233-3628) or Jessica at E.Shaver Books (912-234-7257)—and buy it from them over the phone like in olden times, at which point they’ll notify Harrison via telegram and he'll ride his velocipede down there and sign the book so they can mail it to you. Easy!
