A Marriage in Startled Air

This beautifully told story of a marriage blends Foster’s signature introspective, lyrically descriptive style with the pacing of a mystery. For decades, Patricia and her husband, David, have built their lives around their art, but will a critical illness and what they uncover about David’s childhood affect their ability to create? In 'One Art,' Elizabeth Bishop writes 'the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.' In this powerful book, Foster does, indeed, write it!, and in so doing proves the power of art to heal.

-- Jennifer Horne * author of Odyssey of a Wandering Mind: The Strange Tale of Sara Mayfield, Author and former poet laureate of Alabama *

A Marriage in Startled Air is a brave and beautiful book, a memoir and a love story fused into one. With crystalline honesty and a storyteller’s art, Foster traces the improbable threads of her life and that of her husband, David, as they wind together across decades of time, through suffering and unexpected wonder, all the way from childhood to the gates of mortality.

-- Richard Preston * author of The Hot Zone and The Wild Trees *

Compelling, well written, and emotionally resonant.

-- Lynn Kilpatrick * author of In the House *

Throughout, the prose is lyrical, fresh, and surprising without ever seeming overwrought. The ending is exactly—heart-stoppingly—right.

-- Jennifer Brice * author of Another North: Essays in Praise of the World That Is *

These four words from A Marriage in Startled Air are all you need to know about life: 'Love can begin anywhere...' Of course, love can also end anywhere—and be revived anywhere. Patricia Foster tries to protect her husband; he tries to give her joy. How these forces carry them through his deeply troubling medical ordeal and the revelations of his deeply troubling past is the story here. It’s a beautiful and gripping memoir, a magnificent reminder that love can reveal itself in our most difficult moments.

-- Judy Goldman * author of Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap *

Sometimes a book succeeds on the sheer beauty of the prose. Other times the author’s willingness to be vulnerable is enough. Then again, a book of great clarity whose insights and epiphanies stand out in high relief carries the reader. A book in which all of these are present is a rare and exquisite literary gift. A Marriage in Startled Air is that book.

-- Sue William Silverman * author of Selected Misdemeanors and Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember Y