Remind Me Again Why I Married You

It's Valentine's Day, and Lisa Strauss, nee Diodetto, is spending it playing dutiful wife at a $100-a-head benefit instead of in bed with Eben, her hardworking husband of (is it only?) five years. Once upon a time, Lisa, too, was a member of the corporate workaday world--until she fell in love with her boss (Eben), gave birth to a cute but rambunctious son, and gradually morphed into a stay-at-home mom. Somewhere in the mix Lisa also is a writer with ambitions of fame and glory, but those dreams seem to be shrinking, along with her sex life. That is, until a hotshot literary agent shows interest in Lisa's magnum opus.

Suddenly, she has a pen name, and an excerpt of her book appears in Playboy. In between revising chapters, Lisa is trying--and failing miserably--to get pregnant again. She's going house-hunting with Cynthia Farquhar, the gorgeous blond Realtor/divorcee who has become her closest confidante (and the object of Eben's secret fantasies). And she's wondering if this is all marriage is and can ever be: bonded for life to a man who may never again be the red-hot lover of their pre-marriage union. In fact, he just may turn out to be the conflicted protagonist of her novel--a devoted family man whose moral fiber may not be strong enough to withstand the slings and arrows of lust and temptation. As their lives begin to bizarrely mirror aspects of Lisa's book...as marital life as they know it teeters on the edge of utter chaos, Lisa and Eben search--apart and together--for the answer to the question that has plagued husbands and wives since time immemorial:

Can love survive marriage?

In a wickedly funny, right-on-target look at love and relationships, Rita Ciresi peels back the layers of a marriage with equal doses of hilarity and humanity. Filled with all the zest, zingers, and unexpected surprises of life, Remind Me Again Why I Married You is this uncommonly gifted author at her lusty and liberating best.

No one blends humor and heartbreak like Rita Ciresi, whose award-winning novels are lauded as much for their generous wit as for their unflinching honesty. Ciresi's crowd-pleasing novel Pink Slip captivated readers and critics alike, introducing two utterly unforgettable characters and a love story both bittersweet and comic.

Library Journal

This is a sequel to Ciresi's Pink Slip, a funny romp of a book in which charmingly wacky Lisa Diodetto falls in love with and eventually marries her stuffy yet sexy boss. Now the couple is married and has a five-year-old son named Danny, and it seems they've lost their spark. Lisa is a stay-at-home mom trying to become a famous novelist on the side. Eben works long hours at a job that he finds unfulfilling, the couple is having problems conceiving another baby, and Danny has bad adenoids that cause him to wheeze and snort up a storm. All in all, not much is pleasant in the Strauss household. And it's not that pleasant to read about-we get lots of details about Eben's chronic constipation, for example, and there doesn't seem to be a speck of joy in Eben and Lisa's relationship or parenting. So instead of being funny and charming, the sequel, which is billed on the book jacket as a true look into a marriage, is simply depressing. Fans of Ciresi's previous work may enjoy the reprise, but they will end up disappointed if they're expecting another cute, cheeky tale.-Beth Gibbs, Davidson, NC Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Rita Ciresi is the author of the novels Pink Slip and Blue Italian and two collections of short fiction, Sometimes I Dream in Italian and Mother Rocket, the latter of which won the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. She lives with her husband and daughter in Florida.