New York Review of Books Review

IN MEDICAL SCHOOLS, there's often a course students can opt to take about having difficult conversations . Most of us never take that course. One of the gifts of "Love Warrior" is that Glennon Doyle Melton has had those difficult - one might say impossible - conversations again and again. She is a recovering bulimic and alcoholic who became sober for marriage and motherhood. Then, three kids later, she discovers her husband is wrestling his own addictions: to pornography and sex with strangers. How she - and he - rebuild their lives, together and apart, is what makes "Love Warrior" so riveting. The best-selling memoir, which was also an Oprah's Book Club pick. begins with her descent - and her fall is precipitous. "Bulimia is my safe, deadly hiding place," she recalls. She was 10 years old when she started to binge and purge. "Each night, I bring two cups to bed with me - one filled with food and one to fill with vomit." Later, when she is an adult, even a job teaching third grade doesn't slow down the self-destruction. She spends the first half of the day sobering up from the night before. She's still "a good teacher," she writes. "My love for my students is my grip on the world. I lose that grip every day after dismissal when I drive out of the school parking lot and toward the grocery store to pick up two huge bottles of wine." She finds solace in church, but is frustrated that it closes just when bars are opening up. "The priest clears his throat and tells me it's time to go," she recalls. "I beg, 'At night? Why do you close at night? That's when people need to come.'" After she gets married, sobers up and starts a family, the news of her husband's betrayal, when it comes, is overwhelming: "He looks away from me and starts talking. The first words he says are, 'There have been other women. They've all been one-night stands. The first was a few months after our wedding.' I stop breathing." It can be easier to write your secrets than to say them. Anyone who has ever scrawled the words "Do you like me? Check yes or no," on a slip of paper and passed it to a classmate in elementary school knows this. Melton first finds the courage to tell her truth in a blog: "There is no way to be as honest in spoken words as I can be in written words. I wonder why it's so much easier to be honest with strangers than with family." So there is something particularly special about listening to her narrate the audiobook version of "Love Warrior"; the experience is a little like being holed up with a friend on a girls' getaway weekend and hearing her spill that, despite the Facebook posts and holiday cards you've shared for years, there's a lot more to her story. She tells you how she fought for her marriage and, most importantly, fought for herself. Listening to the audiobook, one feels even more powerfully that Melton is not merely relaying a narrative; she is offering her story with the hope and purpose of connection. "In all my close friendships, words are the bricks I use to build bridges," she says. "To know someone I need to hear her, and to feel known, I need to be heard by her. The process of knowing and loving another person happens for me through conversation." YOU MAY NOT listen to "Love Warrior" all at once, but it offers the best of what audiobooks can do: It slows the narrative down and draws you in close, as if the author is talking to you, and only to you. You can't skim or skip pages the way you can with a printed book, so you don't miss a word. At seven and a half hours, "Love Warrior" can be finished in a weekend or during a week's commute. Even after all the book's success, I know there are some who might find the title and the touchy-feely subject off-putting. To them I would say this: Listening to such a warm and emotionally intelligent author is a worthy investment in a course on difficult conversations, if nothing else. But I suspect that if you give in to the possibility that this book has real wisdom, what will win you over is - to use Melton's words - all the "terrible magic" that happens when things fall apart. VERONICA CHAMBERS is the editor of "The Meaning of Michelle: 16 Writers on Our Iconic First Lady and How Her Journey Inspires Our Own" which will be published in January.