THE SWEET PAIN OF BEING ALIVE

In Evans’ memoir, the author grapples with the gender identity of her deceased spouse.

When Evans’ husband, Terry, ended his own life 14 years into their marriage, she was taken completely by surprise. They had moved to Vermont only a few weeks before, and she knew almost no one there—her own adult children lived far away. After the initial shock had worn off, the author tried to understand why it had happened—to “follow the breadcrumbs,” as one of her friends said at the time. The couple met when both were in their 60s, at a time when Evans believed she would never marry again due to the breakups of two earlier marriages. She was in her “Hedonistic Period,” dating mostly for sex, something Terry wasn’t great at. (She knew about his Catholic upbringing, an influence to which he credited some of his sexual hang-ups.) Even so, the author decided to roll the dice and take a chance on marriage once again. It was three years into the union when she discovered a box of women’s clothes—blouses and dresses in the styles of decades past—hidden underneath the bed. Terry panicked when Evans asked him to explain them. “‘I didn’t mean you to find them this way,’ he reached down to push the box back under the bed. ‘It’s nothing.’ He reacted like a man with a mistress who’s trying to keep the letter in the lavender envelope with the flowery writing on it from his wife.” It turned out that Terry had enjoyed dressing in female clothing ever since childhood, though he had hidden it from everyone except for a few romantic partners who approved of the idea. Evans didn’t like it—she found something offensive in the concepts of cross-dressing and transgender identity—but she had no intention of leaving Terry over it. Their lives together continued for years after her discovery until his death, leaving her to question if Terry had taken his own life because he couldn’t be the person he had always needed to be.

Evans writes in clean, orderly prose, which highlights how her personality contrasted with that of the disorganized, slightly dreamy Terry. The work is a remarkably realistic portrayal of a marriage, in part because the book largely works around the great tension at the center of it rather than addressing it head-on. Much more space is given to the mundane activities and annoyances, such as here, where Evans describes her frustration with Terry’s unwillingness to do housework: “[S]lowly, I became resentful, irritated, because of all the little tasks, outside the more general assignments, that I had to do if I wanted to live in an orderly house…Instead of remonstrating with me, Terry acknowledged the unfairly apportioned ratios of housework and suggested we hire a housekeeper.” There is a novelistic quality to the memoir in its unwillingness to resolve things cleanly and in its narrative voice; the author is unafraid to come across as inflexible or unsympathetic. The book is an exploration of the many things a marriage can be: a source of companionship, yes, but also a hiding place—and, even if only posthumously, a place to finally be seen.

A fascinating and deeply human story about living with a spouse hiding a mysterious inner life.