Author explores role of marriage counseling.
Author explores role of counseling in loosely fictionalized book
“I was busy ... and living a life very un-conducive to staying married.”
John Jay Osborn
Looking back, John Jay Osborn says it’s really no surprise he and his wife, Emilie, hit a rough patch in their marriage 35 years ago and found themselves, in a lastditch effort at reconciliation, driving from the city across the Golden Gate Bridge once a week — separately, because they’d already separated — to meet with a marriage counselor in Mill Valley.
“I was busy working in Hollywood, traveling back and forth and living a life very un-conducive to staying married,” Osborn recalled. He had been wooed by the film industry to write screenplays after the breakout success of “The Paper Chase.” His 1971 novel skewering his experiences as a Harvard Law quintessential tale of law School school student life and is still Socratic considered method-induced the anguish. John Houseman won an Oscar for portraying the imperious contracts professor Charles Kingsfield in the 1973 movie adaptation, and a television series followed that ran for four seasons, on three networks.
“Meanwhile, (Emilie) was a young doctor, trying to get established at UCSF, and we had two little kids,” Osborn, 73, said recently in the living room of their Victorian
home near Dolores Park.
“It was a recipe for disaster, and disaster befell us,” he said. “Then, by pure luck, we found this fabulous counselor.”
Such is the loosely fictionalized setup for Osborn’s new novel, “Listen to the Marriage” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; $25). It opens during a tense therapy session in which Steve (a buttoned-up new partner at a private-equity firm) and Gretchen (an English literature professor “who talks in metaphors”) are meeting with their therapist, Sandy. The three are trying to determine whether Gretchen and Steve can stave off divorce, if their history of betrayals, clashing communication styles and the abraded trust between them can be repaired.
Reminiscent of the HBO series “In Treatment” in its structure, the novel takes place exclusively in Sandy’s office during the couple’s sessions and is narrated through her point of view. The broader world of Gretchen and Steve’s children, lovers and mutual friends comes into focus only as they discuss each week’s pressing concerns.
The book is a slim yet immersive story of what Osborn calls the “lifechanging, transformative, maybe even enlightening experience” of committing with a partner to talking through your differences and harbored resentments “until each sees the other, and themselves, clearly.”
Before sitting down to discuss the book, Osborn said goodbye to Emilie, who was headed out for a neighborhood walk. The two of them averted divorce in the ’80s and now have three grown children and five grandchildren. In July, they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Osborn talks about their four-year stint in couples counseling with the kind of gratitude one hears coronary-bypass survivors use for their surgeons.
“Well, it saved us. It really did,” he said. “Without it, there is absolutely no question we would be divorced.”
He dedicated “Listen to the Marriage” to Marilyn Harris Kriegel, the Osborns’ therapist (now 84 and retired) and their youngest son, Shef, “who was born after we got back together.”
“Listen to the Marriage” is Osborn’s fifth work of fiction and his first novel in 20 years. “The Only Thing I’ve Done Wrong” (1977) was about his childhood in Belvedere and relationship with his father — a physician and descendant of John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, and Cornelius Vanderbilt. “The Associates” (1979), about “young Wall Street lawyers getting beat up by the partners,” was adapted into an ABC series.
Osborn wrote “Listen to the Marriage” as he wound down his 20year-long career teaching estate law at University of San Francisco Law School. He fully retired last year.
He said he had the idea for the novel “many years ago, but I didn’t have enough distance from what we’d been through.” A few years ago, he said, he had two insights: “I realized I had to tell the story from the marriage counselor’s point of view. Hers is the perspective that counts. The other two people are still lost.” (Sandy was “this little machine that could translate what they’d said into what they’d meant,” he writes.) The second insight was that it could all take place in the room.”
At interviews and readings since the book’s release, Osborn has been asked repeatedly if the novel is pro-marriage.
“I guess so,” he says, “although it might be more accurate to call it pro-long-term relationship, or pro-marriage counseling when it’s done right.” He acknowledges that not every marriage, especially when there’s abuse or deep incompatibility, is worth saving. “But a marriage that works, that’s wonderful, becomes critically important.” “I wrote this with a larger purpose in mind,” he said, “just like when I wrote ‘The Paper Chase.’ Back then, I thought it was important because law students were getting screwed and we needed to say something about that. With this novel, I want people to read it and know how helpful a good marriage counselor can be,” he said, especially since the process can seem so opaque to the uninitiated.
“Ever since we saw her decades ago, I’ve been helped by the Marilyn stuff at least once a week. The “Marilyn stuff ?” “All the techniques and exercises I put in the book came from her. She’d say things to us like: ‘There is no bill of rights in a relationship.’ ‘There are no deals.’ ‘No action plans.’ ‘No promises to one another.” Some of it was hard to swallow, he admits, but “really powerful if you buy into it.”
Osborn said he “sent a lot of other couples to Marilyn for help. Some of them said she was completely crazy and stopped going. But then they always ended up divorced.”
“It for disaster was disaster, a befell recipe and us. Then, by pure luck, we found this fabulous counselor.”
John Jay Osborn