Marriage Story: An American Memoir by Marriage Story (retail) (epub)

Author:Marriage Story (retail) (epub)
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 0000000000000
Published: 2021-11-01T07:42:12+00:00

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SO WHO WAS RIGHT? It occurs to me that I have been pondering America—my grandparents’, my parents’, and mine—for decades, attempting to reconcile, at least for my own edification, our various and disparate American experiences. In the end my novels, stories, and essays may be little more than a record of this internal conversation.

In many respects I’m a poster boy for the American Dream my mother believed in until the day she died. I’m a product of public schools and the same low-interest, government-backed student loans my mother saw as our ticket out of Gloversville and into a new, better life out west. I am, on both sides of my family, of immigrant stock—Italian, Irish, French, German. Moreover, despite a lack of material resources when I was young and my relatively undistinguished academic pedigree, not many doors have been closed to me, and the few that were I had little desire to walk through anyway. The America my mother prepared me for was closer to the America of my experience than the one my father feared might have it in for me. It could also be argued that optimism has a way of paying dividends that pessimism rarely does. In America, pessimists are more likely to be right, optimists more likely to succeed.

The thing my father got most right, though, was that America didn’t fundamentally change after the war. The hero’s welcome he got when he returned from overseas was different from the welcome that Black GIs got, especially those returning to the South. Nor was it just the South. In Gloversville when I was growing up, petitions circulated when Black families tried to buy homes on our modest street, and the little starter home in a new development on the outskirts of town that my mother had her eye on would’ve been redlined. The low-interest, government-backed loans I took advantage of were far less available to dark-skinned people. Maybe America didn’t have it in for me, but there were those it did systemically disadvantage, and it’s the legacy of that disadvantage—our refusal to admit to it or discuss the reparations such injustice demands—that fuels our ongoing culture wars. Writing about these conflicts in The New York Times, columnist Tom Friedman argues that what Trump supporters are most attracted to is his willingness to demonize the educated elites who look down on them, who consider them to be, in Hillary Clinton’s famous phrase, “a basket of deplorables.” Trumpers, Friedman explains, will cheerfully accept further economic depredations, provided the educated liberal elites they despise (yes, like me) are taken down a peg or two. Why, they want to know, is the so-called meritocracy, which has the audacity to define merit according to its own purposes, never content to congratulate its winners? Why must it always denigrate those outside its hierarchies and peg them, unfairly, as losers? The way Trump supporters see it, they’ve been not just left behind but humiliated, and my father, having himself been humiliated, would’ve understood that. Having

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