The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage Reimagined - by Wayne Scott (Paperback)

About the Book

"Welcome to Will and Grace with kids, cats, and a mortgage. In a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott's The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage, Reimagined is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again. In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce--the expected outcome--they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a 'common story' about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship. Wayne Scott's marriage memoir will appeal to readers who loved the messy rawness and emotional complexity of Noah Baumbach's film Marriage Story--suffused with a more expansive sense of possibility and hope"--Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Welcome to Will and Grace with kids, cats, and a mortgage.

In a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott's The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage, Reimagined is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again.

In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce--the expected outcome--they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a "common story" about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship.

Wayne Scott's marriage memoir will appeal to readers who loved the messy rawness and emotional complexity of Noah Baumbach's film Marriage Story --suffused with a more expansive sense of possibility and hope.

Review Quotes

"The Maps They Gave Us invents nothing short of a new cartography for human relationships. Diving deeply down into the stories we have been told about how to be men, women, fathers, mothers, feminists, queer, Wayne Scott's story of queer emergence achieves exactly what Adrienne Rich's poem 'Diving Into the Wreck' did: a new way to experience ourselves by understanding gender and sexuality as more fluid and profound than we've been told. I laughed, I cried, I turned inside out, remembering that desire, identity, and family can be any story we want them to be if we open our hearts back up to adaptation and evolution." --Lidia Yuknavitch, author of Thrust and The Chronology of Water

"Bravo to Wayne Scott for offering his true story of liberation from outdated scripts that ask us to lop off vital portions of ourselves in the name of Family, Manhood, and Fatherhood. The Maps They Gave Us is a gift to the world, which is desperate for stories that expand the narrow confines of desire, gender, sexuality, identity, and possibility. And most astonishing and revolutionary of all, Scott offers a new, emancipatory vision of family, one that is expansive enough for ever-evolving desire, no matter how complicated." --Christie A. Tate, author of Group: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life

"There are stories of marriages in crisis, and then there's Wayne Scott's The Maps They Gave Us, which is nothing short of miraculous. He rejects the familiar turns, respects the mysteries of process to offer an experience that feels utterly naked and alive. Vulnerable, candid, and expansive, this book is both a tribute to distinctive relationships and--astonishing surprise--a manual for how to love." --Paul Lisicky, author of Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell

"Emotional, raw, and real, this memoir is a deep dive into one couple's trials and triumphs to redefine marriage to fit their lives and needs. A valuable addition to memoir collections." --Mattie Cook, Library Journal, Starred Review

About the Author

Wayne Scott's New York Times essay, " Two Open Marriages in One Small Room," which appeared in 2020, was later adapted for the Modern Love podcast. Other personal essays and reviews have appeared in The Sun, Poets and Writers, Huffington Post, and The Oregonian, among many others. He writes frequently for The Psychotherapy Networker. In addition to writing, he is a teacher and psychotherapist who enjoys working with other unconventional couples and families. He lives with his partner in Portland, Oregon not far from their three young adult children.