an american marriage synopsis

She has a history of having been shamed for the decision to terminate a pregnancy, and she won’t accept the same treatment from Roy. They're like having in-class notes for every discussion!”, “This is absolutely THE best teacher resource I have ever purchased.

You think I can’t feel how sad you are? But they are black, and in America, that fact trumps everything else.

Roy, particularly, shifts erratically from strained jokes to naked expressions of longing: "This love letter thing is uphill for me," he writes.

An American Marriage. Get the entire An American Marriage LitChart as a printable PDF. Celestial pauses in her testimony so as not to betray the fact that Roy told her about his biological parentage, but the jury is too quick to take Celestial’s hesitancy as a sign of untruth. Even so, Roy is not so much interested in Davina as he is for Celestial. Roy is an ambitious, handsome man with a bit of a wandering eye, but he's devoted to Celestial and determined to support her the way her wealthy parents did. by Tayari Jones. And that’s the hopeful ending of the first part of “An American Marriage.”. And she does – in three parts and thirty chapters, each of which is narrated by one of the three main protagonists of the book: Roy, Celestial, and Andre. The way they lie beside one another that night shows how this event is essentially the end of their marriage. Once Roy is no longer the breadwinner, Celestial seeks a way to earn her own living through her art. Celestial’s first exposure to Roy is overhearing him having sex with a woman in the dorm room next to Andre’s, and though they make fun of the women who call him by his full name, the consistency with which he is able to make his sexual partners exclaim seems to confirm his romantic skills. Prison creates such asymmetrical conditions for married people. Her African American characters would seem to inhabit a different world: They're college-educated, gainfully employed, upwardly mobile; they haven't been flailed by poverty or caught by the hooks of addiction. If you know anything about Oprah Winfrey, you probably know that she doesn’t take her books lightly: during the 15 years of its existence, she recommended no more than 70 books on her famous Oprah’s Book Club.

Instead of sending the doll she’d made to Olive, she made it prison blues and talked only about this story, rather than her personal connection to incarceration via Roy—something Roy will come to resent.
But home isn't where you land; home is where you launch.


“My prayer for you is for peace, which is something you have to make. Celestial uses the story of her grandmother to parallel the feeling she had about a little black boy she passed on the street, imagining him the worst of fates despite the best of circumstances. Roy’s worry about his reaction to Celestial’s pregnancy implies that he is finally taking responsibility for his part in the decision to have an abortion. Of course I will,” answers Roy.

Roy takes a position of humility in acknowledging that he doesn’t have much to offer Celestial at this point, but he remains worried enough about his pride that he asks that Franklin keep the letter to himself.

Andre returns afterward and he and Roy fight. They have no plans to marry, however. . Celestial wants to defend Roy, but she feels the judgement from others when she brings him up in conversation.

Like this summary? Roy stops sending letters until one day he finally has a chance to tell Celestial the things he couldn’t during the previous five years: “Georgia, I am coming home.”. Up until now, I thought I knew what was and wasn't possible. In the Epilogue, we learn from the letters exchanged between Roy and Celestial that Celestial and Andre are back together and that they are expecting a child.

2. And we are not sharing ours. As Roy and Celestial move into that painful future, Jones forces us to consider what they really owe each other. In that moment, the marriage that Roy and Celestial had begun building and the future they had imagined for themselves collapse.

This return to the story of Roy’s biological parentage is important because it helps Roy recognize the similarity between Walter having concealed his identity from him while living in the same cell, and Roy keeping his own secrets from Celestial. Review: Jesmyn Ward’s ‘Sing, Unburied, Sing’. "An American Marriage" isn't a story in which our racist system of justice is the dramatic focus of the plot; that system is simply the toxic landscape these characters inhabit.

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