NYTBR Podcast: "Romantic and Stoic"

"The other thing I read that I actually really loved is a very brief book called Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give by Ada Calhoun. And full disclosure I probably met Ada three or four times through common friends at parties and such. But she wrote a Modern Love column for the Times last year that ending up being one of the top I think forty things read on the site all year. This book is about 150 pages. It's just this really lovely meditation on what it means to be married and faithful in this age. And it draws a lot on her own life with her husband and her son. But it also brings in famous people and what they've said about love—everyone from James Baldwin to, weirdly, J.R.R. Tolkien. It's also this mix of romantic and stoic that I really like and relate to. It's certainly not meant as self-help. It's something that I think you could give to newlyweds, for instance, as a gift of wisdom and counsel, But also, for someone like me who's single and dating, there's just a lot about what we want and expect from each other and that's useful to keep your mind on and to remind you of what's important in what you're looking for. I just felt a lot of affection for this book." — John Williams on the New York Times Book Review podcast, April 21, 2017, minute 37.