PRAISE

“Marrying Friends solidifies Mary Rechner’s place among the short story masters. Told with depth, grace, and intricacy, this novel-in-stories brings us in contact with the most intimate sides of humanity; the hidden hopes, intentions, and dreams that unite and confound us. These fallible and often funny characters have staying power—and Rechner employs a merciless precision to each line. Heartbreaking and redeeming, Marrying Friends is for anyone who’s tried at this thing called life, fallen and gotten back up again. I will forever rush to read anything Mary Rechner writes.” —Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

“No one ever changes. Yet no one ever stays the same. In this beautiful, knowing suite of linked stories, Mary Rechner conjures a group of wayward friends and relatives whose youthful loves and betrayals never faded away, and thus whose midlife encounters become rife with unfinished romance and ever escalating emotional damage. Kind of like The Big Chill as imagined by Anton Chekov, Marrying Friends is a funny, poignant, suppley crafted meditation on how the bells of childhood continue ringing throughout a shared life—a gorgeous, attentive collection to be savored by anyone with a friend.” —Jon Raymond, author of Denial

“Marrying Friends is a daring novel-in-stories, with the agility of a Cirque du Soleil performer, the wisdom of a zen koan, the pleasure of a complicated puzzle, and the brutal honesty of a good therapist. Rechner writes with clarity the moments when the unsayable can no longer be withheld, whether the words are between the friends and family who gorgeously come to life in her book, or truths a character must admit to themselves. Beginning with a death, the Long Island community in Marrying Friends is rebuilt around the loss. Relationships are reshuffled, family goes missing, children arrive, financial and creative lives are disrupted, lovers are scorned and reunited. Everyone does their messy best, which, lucky for us, isn’t so great. Rechner’s book is beautifully crafted, so true in its revelations of our own complicated lives, and yet Recher offers no answers. She extends an invitation to trust the mystery. She extends a hand to us and says, don’t worry, we will make it through.” —Natalie Serber, author of Shout Her Lovely Name

“Marrying Friends, a collection of interconnected stories by New York native and now Portland author Mary Rechner, provides a stunning portrait of a group of high school friends and their families after two decades in a small town on Long Island. In the tradition of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, Rechner’s narrators—mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, lovers, and children—brilliantly weave a kaleidoscope of disparate voices and their stories into a subtle web that bursts with life—in all its beauty, its mystery, and tragedy. Beautifully rendered and executed, it is a joy to travel through the overlapping lives of Marrying Friends’ characters—from plumbers, copywriters, librarians, and stockbrokers, to paralegals, playwrights, and painters. Readers will discover Rechner as a masterful storyteller, completely at home with these people, the times, and Long Island. —Lee Montgomery, author of Whose World is This?

AUTHOR

Mary Rechner is the author of the story collection Nine Simple Patterns for Complicated Women, named to the long list for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award, and the novella The Opposite of Wow, published in the Hong Kong Review. Her fiction has appeared in publications such as New Letters, Harvard Review, Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Kenyon Review, and Washington Square. Her criticism and essays have appeared in Litro, The Believer, Oregon Humanities, and the Oregonian. Treat is a word and music collaboration curated by Rechner and produced by Core Productions. A recipient of fellowships from Literary Arts and the Regional Arts and Culture Council, as well as residencies from Caldera and the Vermont Studio Center, Rechner taught fiction writing at Portland State University and the University of Portland, and now teaches media arts to high school students.