Jamie Lee Curtis and Christopher Guest

I will tell you about a marriage that was kept the way you keep a candle in a windy room. Not by talking about it. By cupping a hand around it and walking slow.

If you have arrived here because you know the woman from the movies, the one who screamed in the doorway in nineteen seventy-eight and then forty-five years later stood on a stage and won the gold statue and cried, welcome. If you have arrived here because you know the man from the films where the comedy is so dry it takes you a second to laugh, the man who can play a fool so gently you love the fool, welcome. And if you have never seen a single frame of either of them, welcome most of all, because this is not a story about the screen. It is a story about a rainy Tuesday afternoon in December of nineteen eighty-four, and a small wedding in a friend's living room, and a quiet agreement two people made early and kept for four decades.

They agreed not to talk about it. That is the strange and beautiful center of this whole book. In an industry that runs on talking about it, on the magazine cover and the red carpet confession and the morning show couch, these two people decided that the one thing they would not sell, would not explain, would not perform, was the marriage itself. And so the marriage lasted. I am not saying those two facts are the same fact. I am saying they might be.

Her name is Jamie. His name is Christopher, though she has called him Chris since the first dinner. This is the story of how she saw a photograph in a magazine in a friend's kitchen in May of nineteen eighty-four and said five words out loud, and how those five words turned out to be true, and stayed true, and are still true: that love is hard, that love is worth it, and that love stays.

You are in the right place.