Love and Marriage

Book subtitles are mostly a marketing thing. They don't usually give you a wholly accurate description of what's inside the covers. They're meant to grab your attention so that you'll pick up the book and give it a chance. As a marketing tool, subtitles have a tendency to oversell a book’s content.

Not so with Jeremy Atherton Lin’s latest book, Deep House. If anything, the subtitle “The Gayest Love Story Ever Told” undersells what's between these covers.

That's because Lin tackles both the personal, and the all-encompassing. He tells not only the (semi-autobiographical) love story between he and his now husband, but at the same time he unwraps the tale of the fight for gay marriage through the 90’s and 2000’s, giving us a beautifully rendered and deeply personal telling of gay love and how it came to be legally recognized.

Lin is a gifted writer. His own love story is told, in part, by placing each space he and his lover lived in — each apartment, rented basement, or shared loft — front and center, detailing the shape of their love in each space, and how it grew from house to house over time. He tells these stories to his partner, calling him “you” throughout. They are intimate stories, in the way that making love is intimate, and in the way that staying home nights, on the couch watching movies together, is intimate. I found these stories very moving and very relatable.

[A word for the non-gay reader: Lin is not afraid of letting us in on some of the physical aspects of his and his partner’s love, as you might guess from the book’s cover. That is not the focus of, or even a large part of, the book. While it may be different than what you are personally used to, it does add to the intimacy of the love story.]

The broader tale of the advances of gay marriage is deftly woven into the personal love story. Sometimes Lin steps back to give us context through stories from earlier decades, but mostly the fight advances at the same time as events in Lin and his partner’s lives.

One wrinkle in the personal love story - while Lin is American his partner is British. They met while Lin was a student visiting London in the late 1990s. Without being able to marry, they found themselves without a way to both reside legally in one or the other's country. So throughout much of the book Lin's partner is in the US illegally, a situation that weighs on both of them and constrains them in ways they hadn't anticipated.

I loved this book. While Lin and his husband have made some different choices than have my husband and I (he talks honestly of their open relationship), I loved reading this story of two men in love, and whose love lasts through decades.

RATING: Five Stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

RATING COMMENTS: A moving and intimate tale told by a gifted writer to his life partner. Lin deftly weaves the broader tale of the fight for gay marriage into his personal love story.

WHERE I GOT MY COPY: I read an advance reviewer’s copy of the ebook, provided courtesy of NetGalley and the publisher, Little, Brown and Company. The book will be available June 3rd.