What It Used to Be Like: A Portrait of My Marriage to Raymond Carver Book

Raymond Carver's wife of twenty-five years powerfully reveals the evolution of their lives together, through love and separation andlove again, as Carver rose to prominence as one of the greatest American writers in the twentieth century I t all began with writing. Meeting Raymond Carver in 1955, when she was fifteen years old and he seventeen, Maryann Burk Carver recounts a tale of love at first sight in which the two teenagers got to know each other by sharing a two year long-distance correspondence that soon after found them married and with two small children. Over the next fifteen years, as Carver's fame grew, the family led a nomadic life, moving from school to school, teaching post to teaching post. Finally, in 1972, they settled in Cupertino, California where Raymond Carver gave his wife one of his sharpened pencils and bade her to write an account of their history. Maryann Carver has been doing just that all of these years, and the result is a breathtaking memoir of a marriage, replete with the intimacy of detail that fully reveals the illnesses and talents of this larger than life man, his complicated relationships, and his profound loves and losses. What It Used to Be Like brings to light, for the first time, Raymond Carver's lost years and stories, the 'stories behind the stories' of this most brilliant writer.Read More