Everything I Have Is Yours: A Marriage

by Eleanor Henderson

Overview

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - From New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson comes a turbulent love story meets harrowing medical mystery: the true story of the author's twenty-year marriage defined by her husband's chronic illness--and a testament to the endurance of love

Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager and he was working at a local record stored--older, experienced, and irresistibly charming. Escaping the clichés of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story.

But, as in any marriage, things weren't always as they seemed. On top of the typical stresses of parenting, money, and work, there were the untended wounds of depression, addiction, and childhood trauma. And then one day, out of nowhere: a rash appeared on Aaron's arms. Soon, it had morphed into painful lesions covering his body. Eleanor was as baffled as the doctors. There was no obvious diagnosis, let alone a cure. And as years passed and the lesions gave way to Aaron's increasingly disturbed concerns about the source of his sickness, the husband she loved seemed to unravel before her eyes. A new fissure ruptured in their marriage, and new questions piled onto old ones: Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one person end and another begin? And how do we exist alongside someone else's suffering?

Emotional, intimate, and at times agonizing, Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces outside both partners' control. It's not only a memoir of a wife's tireless quest to heal her husband, but also one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250787965
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	06/14/2022
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	669,207
Product dimensions:	5.60(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Eleanor Henderson is the author of The Twelve-Mile Straight and The New York Times bestseller Ten Thousand Saints, which was also a finalist for the Award for First Fiction from The Los Angeles Times. Her writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Poets & Writers, and The Best American Short Stories. An associate professor at Ithaca College, she lives in Ithaca, New York, with her husband and two sons

Editorial Reviews

A New York Times Notable Book of 2021
A Vogue Best Book to Read in 2021

"A love story for the ages. A riveting medical mystery. A heartbreaking family epic. A charming coming-of-age tale. Eleanor Henderson's brilliant debut memoir is all these things at once. But perhaps the most apt description for this book would be: absorbing. I dare you to put it down once you've turned the first page. I loved it." --Joanna Rakoff, author of My Salinger Year

"Love is patient, love is kind, but in Eleanor Henderson's new memoir, love is also senseless, chaotic, pathological. You want a peek behind the curtain of someone else's marriage? Read this book. You won't be able to put it down." --Mary Beth Keane, bestselling author of Ask Again, Yes

"Propulsive and brutally honest, Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of one woman's addiction to saving the addict she loves. Can a marriage built upon crisis and trauma survive? Where is the line between self-sacrifice and self-destruction? And can we rewrite the damaging narratives that shape our own stories so that our children, at last, will stop repeating them? A raw, beautiful book that champions radical acceptance as a means of beginning anew." --Anna Solomon, author of The Book of V.

"Everything I Have Is Yours is a gripping portrait of a marriage so full of love, chaos, and heartbreaking, head-slapping contradictions and consolations that it will leave you wondering how any of us survives the institution. Eleanor Henderson is a writer of extraordinary talent, depth, and feeling, and this memoir might be the most candid book I've ever read." --Adrienne Brodeur, bestselling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me

"Everything I Have Is Yours took my breath away. In prose both poetic and precise, this rich, resonant exploration of codependency and chronic illness offers an important challenge to our notions of strength and weakness, sick and well, victim and aggressor, and forces us to ask difficult questions about the limits of devotion. This book is heartrending and profound--it will be a gift to so many who wonder if they're alone." --Nina Renata Aron, author of Good Morning, Destroyer of Men's Souls

"[Henderson] gracefully executes a triple toe loop (as a wife, a mother, and a caregiver), then nails the landing with humor and a certain offbeat panache. . . . The generosity of Henderson's memoir will melt your icy heart." --The New York Times Book Review

"[An] incredible memoir . . . about the depth of the marital bond . . . Everything I Have Is Yours is not a traditional love story, but it is a love story--one as heart-wrenching as it is heart-filling." --BookPage (starred review)

"An intimate, absorbing, and painful look at chronic illness in a relationship." --Library Journal (starred review)

"New York Times bestselling author Eleanor Henderson depicts a different kind of marriage story in this earnest memoir. . . . Henderson unpacks this medical mystery in the context of relationships and modern love. Just how far would you go to save the person you love?" --LitHub

"Marriage memoirs are like confessions--the more honest the better. And Eleanor Henderson's mesmerizing chronicle of her two-decade marriage is ruthless. . . . Rarely has codependency been chronicled with such precision, such poignancy." --Vogue

"A reflection on the powerful intersection of mental and physical illness . . . of love, acceptance, and the bounds of marriage." --GMA

"'It is a confusing time to be a woman who loves a troubled man, ' Henderson writes in this unflinching memoir of her husband's long and confounding medical conditions. She tells their story with a novelist's eye for detail and the honesty of a trusted friend." --The New York Times (Editors' Choice)

"Henderson's writing will pull at your every heartstring. She is raw, emotional, vulnerable. Through it all, she allows herself to be wholly human." --Associated Press

"Everything I Have Is Yours . . . has aspects of medical mystery and horror story, but most readers will leave it with the impression of having taken in a love story as blisteringly beautiful as it is truthful." --Shelf Awareness

From the Publisher

07/12/2021

Henderson (Ten Thousand Saints) combines a suspenseful medical mystery with rocky romance to chronicle the tumultuous history of her marriage in this surprisingly bland memoir. When her husband, Aaron, became the host for a slew of undiagnosable medical conditions—which began in 2011 as a rash, and gave way to skin lesions and severe psychological issues that lasted for years—she was forced to contend with two impossible questions: “Are you with the deluded patient? Or the unfeeling doctors?” From here, Henderson jumps through time to depict her and Aaron’s beginnings as messy, passionate young lovers in college in the ’90s, and, decades later, the trauma and addiction that haunted their relationship and family of four. Throughout, Henderson documents in exhaustive detail her ongoing struggle with her “executively dysfunctional” husband—often comparing him to a child—his “delusional parasitosis,” substance abuse, and the way doctors dismiss his health issues. Though the book is ostensibly about love, Henderson offers few clues as to why she and her husband have stayed together despite the contempt, anger, and betrayal endemic in their relationship. It’s a gut-wrenching story, but it’s also one without heart. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 07/01/2021

Henderson brings a novelist's sensibility to this memoir of her 20-year marriage and the chronic illness of her husband Aaron; she weaves their history with measured prose and emotion in alternating strands. Henderson (fiction writing, Ithaca Coll., NY; Ten Thousand Saints) traces her relationship with Aaron from their first meeting (she a senior finishing high school, he a music store clerk in his mid-20s), through its early years, the trials of her fledgling career, and his revelations of addiction and childhood abuse. The memoir's second thread chronicles Aaron's sudden reoccurring ailments: his stomach swells; his skin blooms with lesions that produce strange fibers; he swears he feels parasites infesting his body. Visits to doctors, specialists, and medical conferences provide few answers. As years pass without a solution, Aaron's mental health declines, and the mystery of his sickness leads to Henderson's deeper exploration of the nature of marriage itself and how physical and mental illness test and expand the boundaries of love and trust. VERDICT An intimate, absorbing, and painful look at chronic illness in a relationship. Readers in similar situations will likely find it strikes a deep chord, but anyone who has endured difficulties in a long-term relationship will find much to ponder here as well.—Kathleen McCallister, William & Mary Libs., Williamsburg, VA

Library Journal

Eleanor, not yet 18, falls for Aaron, a 28-year-old man who, unbeknownst to her, is a paranoid schizophrenic. Narrator Karissa Vacker gives a fine performance of their life before his mental illness and during it. Vacker’s skillful portrayals of Aaron’s psychotic episodes are believable and heartbreaking. He imagines he is full of parasites that are eating him from the inside. He also breaks out in hives. Vacker’s well-paced delivery becomes frenetic and shrill as they follow every possible avenue to identify these parasites. Listeners know these are delusions, but Eleanor is hopeful that there really is a physical problem that can be medicated. Vacker’s insightful presentation introduces listeners to this debilitating disease and its effects on marriage and family. E.E.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

Eleanor, not yet 18, falls for Aaron, a 28-year-old man who, unbeknownst to her, is a paranoid schizophrenic. Narrator Karissa Vacker gives a fine performance of their life before his mental illness and during it. Vacker’s skillful portrayals of Aaron’s psychotic episodes are believable and heartbreaking. He imagines he is full of parasites that are eating him from the inside. He also breaks out in hives. Vacker’s well-paced delivery becomes frenetic and shrill as they follow every possible avenue to identify these parasites. Listeners know these are delusions, but Eleanor is hopeful that there really is a physical problem that can be medicated. Vacker’s insightful presentation introduces listeners to this debilitating disease and its effects on marriage and family. E.E.S. © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2021 - AudioFile

2021-06-16
Portrait of a long-lasting marriage tempered by challenges ranging from drug abuse and infidelity to mental illness.

Nearing the end of high school, Henderson, a straight-laced young woman, fell in with a handsome, older record-store clerk before heading to college. “Tomorrow I’d wear a blue tank top and no bra,” she writes of their second date, “and afterward Aaron would insist that we play pool, and I’d spend the whole time shooting pool while standing perfectly straight, so as not to expose my A-cup cleavage.” He was seven years older, worldly, and sexually experienced, while she had had a few fumbling dates and was, by her account, a bit klutzy. As she learned about Aaron’s drug use, she also found evidence of alcohol abuse and philandering. Then evidence of another kind turned up: the possibility of schizophrenia, which eventually manifested in a terrible syndrome with blistering skin and endless pain. “The quart bottles begin to appear in the cabinet, in the recycling bin, on the kitchen counter,” writes Henderson. “Blue gin the color of mouthwash. Watch him relax. Watch the sores fade to rosy scars.” In time, the problem was identified as Morgellons disease, which, because it’s not well understood, many doctors brush aside. Consulting the only book on Morgellons she could find on Amazon, she found some relevant information—e.g., “with no hope in sight, it is no wonder that most Morgellons patients have depression, anxiety, and/or suicidal thoughts and many have ended their lives.” Though still fraught, the marriage survived the pandemic isolation and into the present. Henderson is self-aware enough to understand that her behavior has been sometimes codependent, and her prose is all fine turns of phrase with the rawest of nerve endings. The sole fault of the book is that it runs too long, with some repetition, and could have benefited from judicious trimming.

A memoir of interest to anyone coping with a loved one’s struggle with illness and dependency.

Kirkus Reviews