Remind Me Again Why I Married You: A Novel

By Rita Ciresi

No one blends humor and heartbreak like Rita Ciresi, whose award-winning novels are lauded as much for their generous wit as for their unflinching honesty. Ciresi’s crowd-pleasing novel Pink Slip captivated readers and critics alike, introducing two utterly unforgettable characters and a love story both bittersweet and comic. Now Ciresi returns to the people and place of that irresistible bestseller in a riotous and rueful, sexy and poignant tale of married love…a novel that asks how two people who fell desperately, passionately, heartbreakingly in love can sustain a second act.

It’s Valentine’s Day, and Lisa Strauss, nee Diodetto, is spending it playing dutiful wife at a $100-a-head benefit instead of in bed with Eben, her hardworking husband of (is it only?) five years. Once upon a time, Lisa, too, was a member of the corporate workaday world--until she fell in love with her boss (Eben), gave birth to a cute but rambunctious son, and gradually morphed into a stay-at-home mom. Somewhere in the mix Lisa also is a writer with ambitions of fame and glory, but those dreams seem to be shrinking, along with her sex life. That is, until a hotshot literary agent shows interest in Lisa’s magnum opus.

Suddenly, she has a pen name, and an excerpt of her book appears in Playboy. In between revising chapters, Lisa is trying--and failing miserably--to get pregnant again. She’s going house-hunting with Cynthia Farquhar, the gorgeous blond Realtor/divorcee who has become her closest confidante (and the object of Eben’s secret fantasies). And she’s wondering if this is all marriage is and can ever be: bonded for life to a man who may never again be the red-hot lover of their pre-marriage union. In fact, he just may turn out to be the conflicted protagonist of her novel--a devoted family man whose moral fiber may not be strong enough to withstand the slings and arrows of lust and temptation. As their lives begin to bizarrely mirror aspects of Lisa’s book…as marital life as they know it teeters on the edge of utter chaos, Lisa and Eben search--apart and together--for the answer to the question that has plagued husbands and wives since time immemorial: Can love survive marriage?

In a wickedly funny, right-on-target look at love and relationships, Rita Ciresi peels back the layers of a marriage with equal doses of hilarity and humanity. Filled with all the zest, zingers, and unexpected surprises of life, Remind Me Again Why I Married You is this uncommonly gifted author at her lusty and liberating best.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: May 27, 2003
• ISBN: 9780440334071

Rita Ciresi

RITA CIRESI is the author of Mother Rocket, which won the 1992 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She is author of the novels Bring Back My Body to Me, Blue Italian, Pink Slip, and Remind Me Again Why I Married You, and the story collections Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Second Wife. She is professor of English at the University of South Florida in Tampa, a faculty member for the Bay Path University online MFA program in nonfiction, and fiction editor of 2 Bridges Review.

Reviews for Remind Me Again Why I Married You

[mrstreme · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The sequel to Pink Slip, this book explores the marriage of Lisa and Eben, their battles to conceive another child and Lisa's efforts to become a writer. I thought this was a good read, though I was disappointed that Ciresi didn't touch on some of the characters from the first book, namely her entire family and Dodie. It's still a fun read and a welcome addition to the chick lit genre.