On Marriage

On Marriage is a hugely thought-provoking, witty, warm tour around every significant writer and thinker on love to have emerged since Adam and Eve. Baum is a charming guide to the wisdom of her inspiring judiciously curated cohort

Alain de Botton

This delightful, acrobatic book is funny, thought-provoking and rigorous at the same time. An effervescent and timely meditation on marriage

Darian Leader

Devorah Baum brings her literary understandings, psychoanalytic scholarship and great aplomb to the marriage conundrum. It's very funny too. Who wouldn't want to marry Devorah?

Susie Orbach

Rarely has the subject of marriage been attended to with such intelligence, breadth of reading and insight, but also with such scrutiny and hope

Hisham Matar

Because marriage doesn't always bring out the best in us, it makes us wonder what the best in us might be. It is part of the extraordinary wit and wisdom of Baum's remarkable book to show us what kind of romance, and experiment in living, we have wanted marriage to be

Adam Phillips

Everything you thought you knew about conjugal beds, secrets, feuds, confessions, triangulations and solaces will be pleasurably complicated by Devorah Baum's wryly insightful tell - all regarding the infinite perversity of marriage - including her own, mine, and probably yours

Laura Kipnis

Exploring her own marriage has given Baum a unique vantage point from which to investigate the private intricacies of other people's arrangements . . . Her ability to sit in the midst of those arguments and unpick their various strands makes her work compelling, as does her willingness to self-interrogate

Times

Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage . . . from Kant to Fleabag via George Eliot and Nora Ephron . . . [On Marriage is] a fascinating exploration of an institution that, for better or worse, "continues to shape and carry our human story"

Stephanie Merritt, Guardian

A comprehensively researched, wry examination of the many dimensions of marriage and how it has evolved

Kirkus

On Marriage is characterized by this kind of agile curiosity . . . Baum holds [marriage] up as a seduction

Rebecca Mead, The New Yorker

Baum is a master at unpicking cliches. She pushes at the boundaries of marriage as a framework for conceiving of ourselves in relation to others . . . Her nimble new work selects and analyses artistic renderings of marriage across philosophy, television, and literature – including work by the novelist Taffy Brodesser-Akner, the theorist Slavoj Zizek, and the screenwriter Phoebe Waller-Bride

The New Yorker, 'The Best Books We Read This Week’

On the subject of conversation and its role in marriage Baum is . . . at her most resonant. . . . This is smart and right. . . . There is more in marriage than may be dreamt of in our philosophies

Wall Street Journal

Baum looks at marriage from multiple angles, legal and political, social and narrative, its interminability and its dailiness . . . it can be funny or tragic or both. Baum’s methodology is to look at what is missing – a philosophy of marriage, a clear idea of what this dominant structure is and how it influences lives. Lovely

The White Review