Book #102: Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir

Title: Marriage and Other Acts of Charity: A Memoir
Author: Kate Braestrup

I loved Kate Braestrup's first memoir, Here if You Need Me so much that I read it once, then made my book group read it, then sent it on to a friend who I thought should read it. I've missed having it around since it I gave it away, so I was thrilled to see that Braestrup had a new memoir out. Once again, she tackles the themes of love and commitment from her perspective as a Unitarian Universalist minister and chaplain for the Maine Game Warden Service. Once again, she talks a lot about how it's love, more than anything else, that gets us in touch with our humanity. Once, again, she tells stories from her kids' lives and from her relationships with those she loves.

In Here if You Need Me, Braestrup writes about losing her first husband Drew, a Maine State Trooper, when she was in her early thirties and had four young children. In this second book, she talks a lot about her relationship with Drew again. I know that she remarried several years after Drew's death, so hearing so much about Drew in the first half of the book made me worried that her second husband felt some competition with the first husband's memory. But in the second half of the book Braestrup focuses on learning to love again, and how love is different the second time around with Simon.

While I remember Here if You Need Me as a more linear memoir, Marriage and Other Acts of Charity feels more like a series of essays placed in rough chronological order. I enjoyed the more essayistic structure of this collection-- and I particularly liked the essays that dealt with Braestrup's relationship with her parents (the bird lady and the man who took her to Denmark). I continue to enjoy her explorations on the themes of love and marriage, but I wonder if she may have exhausted her audience now that this second book has been published. I look forward to reading what Braestrup has to say about other subjects as well.