UPROOTED

Skloot recounts an emotionally turbulent marriage to her mercurial husband.

When the author met her future husband, Steve Skloot, in Haifa, she found his playfulness refreshing—he was “like a big kid in every way,” a welcome contrast to the sullen gravity she associated with the typical Israeli men she encountered. They didn’t have much time to get to know each other—he was visiting Israel from New York to volunteer at a kibbutz—but during that brief courtship, she became pregnant. Within six months, they were married and headed back to New York to start a life together, a frighteningly radical decision for the author. She missed her family and hated New York—it “was too much of everything: too much noise, crowds, eternal gray skies, and, more than anything, loneliness.” Also, she learned that Steve was maddeningly unpredictable, hardworking, and affectionate, but also angry and imperious. “Being married to Steve was riding a roller coaster, up, down, up, down—wonderful music at five o’clock then angry words at five thirty; champagne dinners giving way to lonely weeks; mutual showers one day and slammed doors the next.” Skloot poignantly limns the chaos of their marriage and her husband’s sometimes-bizarre eccentricity—he once brought a goat home to their New York City apartment, intending to make it their pet. She discusses her travails with admirable candor and ultimately furnishes an impressively balanced account of their marriage and three kids, affectingly painting Steve as a “crazy, wonderful, tormented soul.” Steve died young from a malignant brain tumor, and the author was heartbroken but exhilarated to once again have the freedom to govern her own life. Skloot’s writing style is companionably informal—her remembrance reads like a story conveyed from one old friend to another with great sensitivity and insight.

A moving recollection, thoughtful and bracingly honest.