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"  For some time, I&amp;#039;ve had a fantasy of writing an advice column in which readers would ask me various questions about the nature of love and marriage and children and money, and I would respond to all questions with the same answer: Be lucky. How can you be successful? Be born into the right family; have good teachers in elementary school. How can you be happy in love? Find the right man or woman. How can you raise children you&amp;#039;re proud of? Give birth to nice children. In everything that matters, it is way better to be lucky than good. Luck rules. Everything else is negligible by comparison.  I may have to suspend my dream of such a column, however, since Ann Patchett&amp;#039;s new collection of essays, This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, makes roughly the same point, but perfectly. All of the essays, which have been collected from her magazine work over two decades, are excellent. Patchett writes enviable prose \u2014 fluid, simple, direct, clear, and fearless \u2014 and she writes about many things \u2014 food, working as a waitress, opening and running a bookstore. But in collections like this one, there&amp;#039;s always a best chocolate in the box. In this case, the standout is the title piece about the nature of marriage.  If you&amp;#039;re married, or planning to get married,or even deciding whether to be open to the possibility of marriage, you should read it.  &amp;quot;This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage&amp;quot; is mostly the story of a bunch of unhappy marriages. Patchett comes from an amazingly long line of divorced people \u2014 even now, it&amp;#039;s rare to find a family in which divorce runs back four generations \u2014 and her first marriage followed the family pattern. The wedding day itself might have been a tip-off: &amp;quot;My wedding shoes were lost the day of the ceremony and never found. We married outdoors and bees swarmed the flowers in my hair during the exchange of vows. The wedding cake melted in the heat and because there wasn&amp;#039;t time to make another cake, my sister frosted the empty pans so that we could take pictures in which we pretended to slice.&amp;quot; The honeymoon wasn&amp;#039;t any better. &amp;quot;The car threw a rod through the engine on our way out of town and we spent our honeymoon, and all our honeymoon savings, at a Gulf station in Pulaski, Tennessee, the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.&amp;quot; With luck like that, it&amp;#039;s a miracle the marriage lasted a year. Failed marriages are the norm for many of us, not just Patchett, which is why it&amp;#039;s the good ones, and not the bad ones, that require the most explaining. After the collapse of her first marriage, Patchett fell into a relationship with a good-looking doctor. He wanted to marry her, but she resisted him, due to her own deep misgivings about marriage. Undaunted, he persisted. For ten years. He didn&amp;#039;t marry any of the various other women who wanted to marry him. He survived a major heart injury. How much good luck can a woman have? When she did finally agree to marry him, it turned out to be wonderful. Exposure to good marriages and bad has given Patchett what you might call perspective. But the only really conventional insight she offers in the story comes from somebody else, a woman named Edra: &amp;quot;Does your husband make you a better person?&amp;quot; Edra asked. There I was in that sky-blue pool beneath a bright blue sky, my fingers breaking apart the light on the water, and I had no idea what she was talking about. &amp;quot;Are you smarter, kinder, more generous, more compassionate, a better writer?&amp;quot; she said, running down her list. &amp;quot;Does he make you better?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s not the question,&amp;quot; I said. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s so much more complicated than that.&amp;quot;  &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not more complicated than that,&amp;quot; she said. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s all there is: Does he make you better and do you make him better?&amp;quot; Patchett is more reserved. She regards her own story as proof that nobody really knows what he or she is doing. There is no talk of &amp;quot;working on the relationship&amp;quot; here. No received wisdom. No semi-therapeutic plan for couples to follow to attain happiness like hers. After thirty pages of analysis, her conclusion is bracingly simple: She got lucky. She blundered around until she stumbled into happiness. &amp;quot;When someone comments on my happy marriage I want to say, My God, look at the circumstances&amp;quot; \u2014 the circumstances being that she loves her husband pretty much totally, and he&amp;#039;s pretty much totally a great guy.  It&amp;#039;s kind of disappointing. You might hope for some practical guidance. &amp;quot;Be lucky&amp;quot; may be correct advice, but it&amp;#039;s not particularly useful. On the other hand, there is value in knowing that being lucky really matters. It&amp;#039;s vitally important for everyone who is married or who is going to get married to remember. Failure is normal. Failure is part of being with people. So when you do get lucky, when you do find those happy circumstances, hold on for dear life. PLUS: Read More Stephen Marche on The Culture Blog &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a25910/marriage-story-ann-patchett/>