Beth Ann Fennelly/Sappho

Married Love
In every book my husband’s written, a character named Colin suffers a horrible death. This is because my boyfriend before I met my husband was named Colin. In addition to being named Colin, he was Scottish, and an architect. So you understand my husband’s feelings of inadequacy. My husband cannot build a tall building of many stories. He can only build a story, and then push Colin out of it.
Married Love II
There will come a day—let it be many years from now—when your kids realize no married couple ever needed to retreat at high noon behind their locked bedroom door to discuss taxes.
Married Love III
As we lower onto the December-cold pleather seats of the minivan, we knock hands: both of us reaching to turn on the other’s seat warmer first.
Married Love IV
Morning: bought a bag of frozen peas to numb my husband’s sore testicles after his vasectomy. Evening: added thawed peas to our carbonara.

By Beth Ann Fennelly

Fennelly writes about fragments from her life. In ‘married love’, she writes about her relationship with her husband. She includes several mundane, yet loving and thoughtful acts of love, which I find very honest and charming. I also think Fennelly’s work very witty and lighthearted, especially the first fragment. You can see there is no true spite or anger at her husband by the use of wit and humor.

How Fennelly writes about love is quite different from Sappho. Sappho writes about longing for love while Fennelly writes about having love.  Sappho focuses on more on the passionate and sexual aspects of love, and how it is this huge, unattainable thing.  However, ‘In married love’, Fennelly writes fragments about the simple,  small act of love. She wants to show how love doesn’t have to be grand for it to be genuine.

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