The Paris Review

Watership Down

Revisited is a series in which writers look back on a work of art they first encountered long ago. Here, Emily Ruskovich revisits Richard Adams’s Watership Down. 

My parents had known each other for only three weeks when my dad asked my mom to marry him. She was stunned by his proposal, and so she said, Let me think about it. And she sat there for a few minutes in silence, thinking, while my dad, in agony, sat there and watched her think.

After considering the question logically, my mom said yes, for five reasons. She laughs when she tells this story, though she assures me that it’s true. In those few minutes, she decided that even though she hardly knew my dad, she ought to marry him because:

  1. He, like her, ate the entire apple, swallowed the core and all the seeds, so she knew he was not wasteful or pretentious.
  2. He, like her, had always wanted to name a son the unusual name Rory, and that seemed an important, even

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