I just finished reading “What It Used to Be Like” Maryann Burk Carver’s memoir about her life with Raymond Carver. I am blown away, for many reasons, and I’m not sure how to start talking about it.

I guess I’ll start with Maryann. I am stunned, reeling even, at her lack of resentment toward Raymond Carver. I knew he was an alcoholic, I knew he abused her; I didn’t know how bad it was. I didn’t know just how unbalanced he was in so many ways. But here’s the real thing, the thing that had me going back and back to this book: her unwavering love and loyalty to him.

I knew that they eventually divorced and I kept waiting for that — for Maryann to realize that she should not keep taking him back, should stand up for her own choices and career path and, for God’s sake, her children, but she did not. Even once we get to the divorce (4/5 of the way through the book) she still discusses their letters and phone calls and his life with nothing but love, and even awe.

Maryann gave up her college education at least 3 times (I lost count), a lucrative and ego building sales job, and a teaching position in a prestigious community. That list does not tap the surface or give you enough of an impression of the cocktail waitressing and other jobs she took to keep her family afloat when Ray would insist they move again and again and again.

Maryann drank hard, right beside him; she drank like it was another job. They were similar, too similar, in their ability to rationalize their drinking, their constant moving, and their spending. Really, that might have been the biggest problem their relationship had — she could not rein him in because she was too like him and she adored him too much. They ran away, literally, from landlords at least 3 times (I lost count), drank what they could afford with the last dollars in their pockets, and quite literally ruined their children.

Her writing is weak. The dialogue is stilted and the erratic pacing is almost laughable at times. Here is what we get, as its own paragraph, after a visit from their estranged, troubled oldest daughter:

“Chris’s visit was difficult and left us both saddened.”

Really?

But I was more than engrossed: I knew how this story ended, their divorce, Raymond’s early death from cancer, but I was waiting to see Maryann’s epiphany or her facing the truth of her hero husband’s serious, heartbreaking flaws. She never gets there.

She slows down her pacing to minutiae in her detailed description of the last time she saw Ray, and if what she tells us is true, yes, Raymond did still love her even after he was remarried. She gave up her youth, her own aspirations, and a stable life for her children for Carver’s work, and even at the end, has no regrets for her choices: she values his work, and her part in it, that much.