Nancy McCabe

Welcome

Nancy McCabe is the author of five creative nonfiction works and a novel, most recently Can This Marriage be Saved? A Memoir. She is an essayist and fiction writer whose work has experimented with alternate forms and incorporated memoir, travel writing, research, and commentary on topics related to China adoption and children’s … Read More about Welcome

Can This Marriage Be Saved? A Memoir

  In this warm, deeply personal, and often humorous book, Nancy McCabe re-examines and gains new understanding of her early life and her ill-advised marriage. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s “Metamorphosis,” how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes, McCabe examines the many influences that led to her youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of her life. Reviews “This is a failed-marriage memoir with an interesting twist: the narrator admits to entering the…

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— Lee Martin,
author of From our House

“Nancy McCabe is a rare blend of thinker and artist. After the Flashlight Man, her courageous and beautifully written memoir, is must reading for both men and women: any man who has wittingly or unknowingly threatened a woman; any woman who has found herself outside her familiar life, yearning to return. Nancy McCabe makes plain, with stunning grace and strength, the redemptive power of story.”

— Beth Ann Fennelly,
author of Heating and Cooling: 54 Micro-Memoirs

“Why should a reader care about some writer’s long-ago, short-lived marriage? Because when the writer is Nancy McCabe, the examination of that long ago marriage helps us understand our own struggles for love and independence…. This is an immensely lively performance from which we emerge not merely entertained but enlightened and grateful. McCabe’s done the difficult work of probing her heart, which brings us closer to apprehending our own…. An engaging, spirited, and thoughtful work.”

 

— Dinty W. Moore,
author of Between Panic and Desire and The Truth of the Matter

“They say it is impossible to understand another person’s marriage, and perhaps equally impossible to comprehend your own, but Nancy McCabe’s Can This Marriage be Saved is a wise, funny, and inventive attempt to put those notions to rest. McCabe recounts her early years vividly, with delightful honesty and remarkable insight. Every page is a pleasant surprise.”

Meet Nancy

  I’m the author of six books, most recently the memoir-in-essays Can This Marriage be Saved? In these pieces, I re-examine and gain new understanding of my early life and my ill-advised marriage at the age of 20. Borrowing from Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, how-to essays and before-and-after weight loss ads, a curriculum guide, Bible Study notes, an obsession with Tom Swiftie jokes, and women’s magazine columns and quizzes that oversimplified women’s lives and choices, I examine the many influences that led to my youthful marriage—and out of it, into finally taking control of my life. While I write about a variety of subjects, they’re all linked by one motivation: my passion for … Read More about Meet Nancy