The Rye Bread Marriage: How I Found Happiness with a Partner I'll Never Understand

Experience a beautiful, humorous, universal love story with this memoir about learning to live with another human being and how every relationship is a mystery—and a miracle.  

When they first meet, John, a dashing European, a Latvian refugee, a physics PhD, is hoping to settle down. Michaele, a fast-talking American college student, is hungry for an independent life as a writer and historian. When they meet again some years later, Michaele is ready. Or so she thinks. And opposites attract, right?

The life Michaele and John build together intermingles sweetness—their love of good food, entertaining, and family—with complications, including their ethnic and religious differences (Michaele is Jewish; John is not), the trauma John endured as a child during WWII, Michaele’s thwarted ambitions, and even John’s preoccupation with Latvian rye. When he opens a successful company marketing rye bread, Michaele embarks on a European journey in search of her husband’s origins, excavating poignant stories of war, privation, and resilience. She realizes at last that rye bread represents everything about John’s homeland that he loved and lost. Eventually Michaele comes to love rye bread, too.

An enticing memoir for readers of Dani Shapiro’s Hourglass, Bess Kalb’s Nobody Will Tell You This But Me, and Heather Havrilesky’s Foreverland, The Rye Bread Marriage asks, how do the stories we live and the stories we inherit play out in our relationships? After forty years of marriage, Michaele Weissman has a few answers.