Q&A Katie Roiphe

MARRIAGE IS IN the air, and not just because it's wedding season. This month alone has seen the defeat of the amendment banning same-sex marriage in Massachusetts; Rebecca Mead's takedown of the wedding industry, "One Perfect Day"; Tina Brown's expose of our era's most famous bride in "The Diana Chronicles"; and the much talked-about documentary "Crazy Love," portraying a long-married couple so flamboyantly dysfunctional that the very institution suffers by association.

Katie Roiphe's new "Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Portraits of Married Life in London Literary Circles 1910-1939" (The Dial Press), may sound too scholarly for this list -- and indeed, the title does seem a departure for such a polemicist. Fourteen years ago, when Roiphe launched her career with "The Morning After" -- a provocative attack on feminists for leaching women of their sexual agency -- this paper branded her a "Camille Paglia in pigtails" (she was only 25 at the time). It was followed by another polemic, "Last Night in Paradise," bemoaning the loss of mystery in contemporary sexuality, and "Still She Haunts Me," a novel sympathetically fictionalizing the unseemly fascination "Alice in Wonderland" author Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) had with children. But there's a thread connecting all of these books: an impassioned defense of "wild, unsensible feeling."

The quote comes from a passage in "Uncommon Arrangements" about the modernist writer Katherine Mansfield's enduring "child love" for her no-account husband, John Middleton Murray. In our own therapy culture, such an "unhealthy" relationship would seem ripe for couples' counseling, but Roiphe comes to a different conclusion: "For some people, their loves, their ability to chisel and sustain an implausible fantasy about another person is a central manifestation of their creative mind." In other words, art itself.

Mansfield and Murray's union is just one of the myriad progressive "arrangements" that sprang up in England between the wars. Among the other lovers on whom Roiphe trains her incisive eye are H. G. and Jane Wells, Vanessa and Clive Bell, and Radclyffe Hall and Una Troubridge, all of them committed to making new a stodgy institution. The resulting collection of mini-biographies is surprising and instructive -- self-help for the literary-minded by a writer who believes in studying the lives of others in order to inform our own.

Recently separated from her husband of five years, Roiphe lives in Brooklyn with her 3-year-old daughter. I visited her there on a recent rainy night to discuss her book over a glass of wine.

IDEAS: You began your career commenting on the present. This time around, why did you decide to look to the past?

ROIPHE: I started to write this book when my own marriage was falling apart. In a desperate attempt to make sense of what was happening I turned immediately to my bookshelf, to the memoirs and diaries and letters of writers and artists who fascinated me. It was a very immediate and urgent process -- I was looking at these lives for what they could teach me.

Marriage is such an inscrutable subject. You see the surface of a married couple at a dinner party, but how much do you really know about what's going on in their relationship? It's so private. One of the great things about going into the past is that you have your subject's letters and memoirs, you have diaries from people who knew them and saw them and wrote everything down -- there's a lot of information. You can't get into the present in quite the same way.

IDEAS: Why did you choose this particular period?

ROIPHE: Because I think it mirrors ours in a lot of ways. The couples I wrote about were born Victorians, but came of age in a modern era, so they were torn between traditional, nostalgic ideas about marriage and ideas about equality and sexual frankness. There are a million ways the same tensions hold true now. On the one hand we have stay-at-home moms who have an old-fashioned idea of what it is to be a wife -- cooking gourmet dinners for their banker husbands -- and on the other hand, a compulsion that so many of us feel about having equal relationships. These issues are still very electric.

IDEAS: How do you account for that? Arguably, their cultural shifts were much more pressing than ours.

ROIPHE: It's hard to say. In some sense, the issue now is the fallout of the feminist revolution in the 1970s. The change was so sudden -- women were out in the workforce almost overnight -- that it's taken a long time for our minds to catch up. In the 1920s it was fashionable to predict that by now we'd be perfectly happy in our relationships, because we'd all have had sexual freedom and experience before we married. But all that freedom and equality has created its own forms of bewilderment. You can't look at marriage now and say that it's happier than it was in 1910 or 1920. It's differently unhappy. Or in many instances the same exactly.

IDEAS: Surely it's changed in some ways?

ROIPHE: There's definitely more of a popular discussion surrounding the ways in which people are unhappily married than there used to be. You can pick up a trashy novel about a woman's discontentment with her husband. You can go to a couples' therapist and discuss the unhappiness. This language trickles down from the therapist's office to Redbook magazine. I don't know that that necessarily helps anyone, but it creates a different atmosphere.

IDEAS: Does it create a more sanitized conversation? The people you wrote about had to invent their own language.

ROIPHE: Yes, they were pioneers. They were thinking about their relationships as a creative act, like writing a story or making a painting. We don't think about marriage in these terms; we think about it therapeutically.

I see this as a book about people who were trying to live differently. And even though doing so was often misguided and ill-conceived in 16 different ways, there's something about constructing your life differently from the most obvious way that is moving and interesting and sort of magnificent.

IDEAS: Which of their ideas most surprised you?

ROIPHE: One of the ideas they had which seems so strange and exotic now, and touching in a weird way, is that you can rationally control your emotions, and triumph over jealousy and possessiveness. It's such a heroic idea, but it's also doomed to failure. Over and over again each one of these couples comes up against the ways in which you can't be rational in your romantic life. You never can.

IDEAS: Did your thoughts about marriage change by the time you were finished?

ROIPHE: I learned a lot about marriage through this period of my life. Such as how much happens in marriage when you're not paying attention. So often there will occur a little misunderstanding between two people that they don't even notice that will slowly turn into a huge, accruing distance. Say somebody sends you a letter, and you're sick in bed with a stomachache; you put the letter in a drawer and never respond to it, they're furious you never responded, and suddenly there's a huge issue that remains between you forever.

I also started to see some of the relationships that seem crazy, and in our word "dysfunctional," as admirable acts of the imagination. How did this woman love this man for so many years, even though he was behaving so badly for all that time? I began to see it as a kind of invention on her part. And that made me feel that all this experience we have in our life, whether it's bad or good, is somehow redeemed and salvaged. In certain ways it's another kind of art.

Kate Bolick is senior editor of Domino magazine. Her interviews appear monthly in Ideas. E-mail kbolick@globe.com.