In a series of thoughtful, poignant personal essays that belie the somewhat humorous title and cover of this fine collection, Joey Franklin, assistant professor of English at Brigham Young University, muses on life as a modern man.
The eponymous essay closes this slim volume with Franklin's consideration of the nature of love. He brings together a preacher's saccharine hyperbole about married bliss, his own love-at-first-sight relationship with his wife, and Shakespearean sonnets to illuminate the complexity and difficulty of romantic connections with other flawed human beings, meanwhile pointing out the inherent illogic of trying to tell any kind of "true" story.
After a lightly humorous essay on his journey to become a dancer as a young man--in which he discovers that perhaps he isn't destined to become the next Fred Astaire--Franklin drops in a personal piece about his own childhood. Using the remembrance of touch and his father's year in prison as focal points, he delivers a poetic, meditative treatise on the tenuous nature of memory, the fragility of relationship between parent and child, and how our own recollection of events can change over time as we gain new experiences.
As a title, My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married has the hollow ring of a bumper sticker or T-shirt. Luckily, the contents promise a much stronger, deeper resonance with thoughtful readers who may see themselves reflected in Franklin's often universally recognizable stories about childhood, children, growing up and adulthood. --Rob LeFebvre, freelance writer and editor