Losing the Garden: The Story of a Marriage

"Losing the Garden" is a love story. An unusual love story of a couple involved in an unusual life style. Laura and Guy Waterman homesteaded in the mountains of Vermont. Their personal detailed account of everyday life is fascinating. I happen to know Laura personnaly; as her father and my husband taught at The Lawrenceville School, her father was an emininant Emily Dickinson scholar. Because of this fact I was very interested in reading Laura's book and subsequently I rated it five stars. Every page was fascinating in many ways which included their daily rituals, and a loving relationship with a complex, anguished partner. I whole-heartedly recommend reading "Losing the Garden."

Laura Waterman's gem, a memoir of her marriage to Guy Waterman, reminds me of the paintings of Vermeer. Her exquisite, understated prose conceals as much as it reveals in its simplicity. It's not a modern tell-all core dump. We don't hear about the underside of marriage: sex, personal hygiene, quarrels. This is instead a beautiful and heart-felt portrait of a lost love. The Guy Waterman Laura describes in her biographical sketch was a well-educated and highly accomplished man. He lived with at least four diagnosable psychiatric conditions and had made a mess of his first marriage and fatherhood. Yet he continued on, with the support of Laura's unconditional love, until he could bear life no longer. After making sure Laura was financially secure, he died on his own schedule and in his own fashion. Disturbed he was, yet what astonishing creativity and productivity along the way! Aside from his writings on the outdoors, which continue to be influential, among many other things he for years played a game of baseball in his head based on Milton's "Paradise Lost". This reminds me of the story in Robert Lindner's "The 50-minute Hour" called "The Rocket-propelled Couch", in which the patient (rumored to have been Robert Oppenheimer while working on the Manhatten Project) builds an imaginary universe so fascinating in its workings that the analyst takes it over and thereby cures the patient. It's a great tragedy that Waterman's experience with psychiatry, as described by Laura, was so aversive. The Watermans attempted to live according to the 19th century Romantics. Wordsworth would have approved of their naming the trees at Barra. Their life was simplified, pared to the bare essentials. Every half-hour of every day was scheduled, though Laura describes never feeling rushed. But it was organized to be maximally productive, a necessity if they were to make their mode of living work. And the things scheduled were fine things: reading, writing, music; and the chores of 19th century living: baking, wood-cutting, gardening, syruping. Their amusements were 19th century amusements: reading aloud, writing letters, playing the piano. The Watermans lived out their dream at Barra of life as they thought it ought to be lived. They might be accused of a lack of seriousness, and indeed much of Guy's activity - counting blueberries, baseball to Milton, climbing the peaks of the White Mountains from the four points of the compass in all weathers - can only be described as useless activity - in a word, play. Yet it is play of such a high order as to transcend ordinary life and perhaps touch the eternal. Guy is reported to have told someone that the only time he ever felt good was above timberline in a snowstorm. Perhaps in his last frozen moments on Mt. Lafayette he found the peace that had eluded him for so many years. What about Laura? She had her own burdens to live with, and did better with them than most. About her marriage we learn o

This is one of the most absorbing stories I have ever read, a memoir as steeped in nuance as "Are You Somebody?" The book demonstrates how nonfiction can equal--and even surpass--the finest fiction. It succeeds on so many levels: (1) as a great read, (2) as an entertaining "Swiss Family Robinson" tale of clever and dedicated homesteading, (3) as a case study of the torments and deceptions of depression, and (4) as a cautionary tale of the layrinths of "codependency" a.k.a. marriage. The husband is a man of tragic conflicts and inner struggles, both hugely talented and sadly flawed. Yet it is the wife (the narrator) who ultimately emerges as the more complex, interesting, and intelligent half of the couple. I have spent many hours pondering her particular combination of strengths and weaknesses. Her candor is striking. Her flaws are fully revealed. She is a gifted, fearless, and very likeable storyteller. As you read this story, you feel yourself learning to know someone as intimately as a family member.

In 1971 Laura and Guy Waterman decided to give up all the conveniences of modern urban life and homestead in a cabin in the mountains of Vermont, living off the land in harmony with the local ecology and environment. From almost thirty years they created a deliberate life, eating food they grew themselves, living without indoor plumbing or electricity. The end of this unique marriage came on February 6, 2000, when Guy climbed to the summit of Mount Lafayette in New Hampshire's White Mountains and sat down among the rocks to die. Losing The Garden: The Story Of A Marriage is the compelling and intensely personal memoir of a women who had to struggle with her husband's plan to commit suicide. This is the story of a husband's depression, an account of a marriage seen outwardly as idyllic, but deeply flawed from within. Strongly recommended reading which is both thoughtful and thought-provoking, Losing The Garden is a love story, a portrait of an intense and unusual union, and an affirmation of life after loss.

This is the story of two lives and their development into equal and opposite meanings -- Guy's who'd finished the course he set for himself, and Laura's slow painful comprehension of what happened as well as a far clearer understanding of her deepest sense of who she is. Laura writes with so much tenderness, understanding and candor for something that obviously has been hugely difficult for her. I could not put it down. It is going to become a classic, especially as the question of choosing one's way of final exit is more and more debated today.