Beard: A Memoir of a Marriage

Lundquist, an English professor at North Hennepin Community College in Minnesota, debuts with a wrenching account of the breakup of her marriage to a gay man. Lundquist met her future husband in the late 1990s at a Christian camp, where the two bonded over their love of TV soaps and off-kilter humor. In spite of her ex’s jumbled attempts to explain his identity crisis (“I’m afraid you can’t actually know me. Not really,” he told her), they began dating in their teens and married in their early 20s. Trouble arrived when Lundquist found grainy photographs of a half-naked man on their shared computer; her husband brushed her off by explaining they were related to quasi–conversion therapy he’d had as a teen. The couple then moved to Chicago’s gay district, where Lundquist eventually discovered that her husband had been sleeping with men throughout much of their marriage. In addition to chronicling her marriage’s demise, the author reckons with the religious, sin-obsessed environment in which she and her husband had been raised; binary notions of sexuality and desire; rejection and loneliness; and her own quest to lose weight in an effort to gain control in a world that views beauty and thinness as currency. At once brave and tender, this is a candid look at the burdens of love and the challenges of discovering oneself. (Nov.)