Order Propeller Books  Bookshop 

Willamette Week Best Story Collection 2023: Marrying Friends by Mary Rechner

Best read by fans of the interconnected stories-meet-novels style of Jennifer Egan (A Visit From the Goon Squad), Marrying Friends is a collection that wholeheartedly looks at the loving, changing ways that lifelong friends stay connected. Centered on a group of high school friends who are still connected 20 years after graduation, Friends looks at grief, how friends and families survive it, and how to move forward. Extra points for the simple but delightful cover art.

-Michelle Kicherer, Willamette Week

No one ever changes. Yet no one ever stays the same. In this beautiful, knowing suite of linked stories, Mary Rechner conjures a group of wayward friends and relatives whose youthful loves and betrayals never faded away, and thus whose midlife encounters become rife with unfinished romance and ever escalating emotional damage. Kind of like The Big Chill as imagined by Anton Chekov, Marrying Friends is a funny, poignant, suppley crafted meditation on how the bells of childhood continue ringing throughout a shared life—a gorgeous, attentive collection to be savored by anyone with a friend. 

-Jon Raymond, author of Denial and Freebird

Marrying Friends, by Mary Rechner, is a daring novel-in-stories, with the agility of a Cirque du Soleil performer, the wisdom of a zen koan, the pleasure of a complicated puzzle, and the brutal honesty of a good therapist. Rechner writes with clarity the moments when the unsayable can no longer be withheld, whether the words are between the friends and family who gorgeously come to life in her book, or truths a character must admit to themselves. Beginning with a death, the Long Island community in Marrying Friends is rebuilt around the loss. Relationships are reshuffled, family goes missing, children arrive, financial and creative lives are disrupted, lovers are scorned and reunited. Everyone does their messy best, which, lucky for us, isn’t so great. Rechner’s book is beautifully crafted, so true in its revelations of our own complicated lives, and yet Rechner offers no answers. She extends an invitation to trust the mystery. She extends a hand to us and says, don’t worry, we will make it through. 

-Natalie Serber, author of Shout Her Lovely Name and Community Chest

Marrying Friends, a collection of interconnected stories by New York native and now Portland author Mary Rechner, provides a stunning portrait of a group of high school friends and their families after two decades in a small town on Long Island. In the tradition of Thornton Wilder’s classic play Our Town, Rechner’s narrators –mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, lovers, and children– brilliantly weave a kaleidoscope of disparate voices and their stories into a subtle web that bursts with life — in all its beauty, mystery, and tragedy.

Beautifully rendered and executed, it is a joy to travel through the overlapping lives of Marrying Friends’ characters – from plumbers, copywriters, librarians, and stockbrokers, to paralegals, playwrights, and painters. Readers will discover Rechner as a masterful storyteller, completely at home with these people, the times, and Long Island.

-Lee Montgomery, author of Whose Worlds Is This and The Things Between Us

Marrying Friends solidifies Mary Rechner’s place among the short story masters. Told with depth, grace, and intricacy, this novel-in-stories brings us in contact with the most intimate sides of humanity; the hidden hopes, intentions, and dreams that unite and confound us. These fallible and often funny characters have staying power—and Rechner employs a merciless precision to each line. Heartbreaking and redeeming, Marrying Friends is for anyone who’s tried at this thing called life, fallen and gotten back up again. I will forever rush to read anything Mary Rechner writes.”

-Chelsea Bieker, author of Godshot and Heartbroke

New edition, Northwest Collection, with a foreward by Miriam Gershow: “I didn’t remember how dark these stories were. How deliciously dark. As I reread them, I was almost incredulous. How had this not scared me? How had this not sent me running? They’d done the opposite – they’d fed me, slaking a thirst I hadn’t known I had.”

Novella The Opposite of Wow published in The Hong Kong Review

From Propeller Books

“With no frills, no gimmicks, just a gimlet eye and quicksilver prose, Rechner defamiliarizes the mundane and makes it marvelous.”
–Malena Watrous, The Believer

“Reading one of Rechner’s stories is akin to biting into a chocolate that looks perfectly sweet but whose center harbors a bitter surprise. Yes, you’d probably be safer choosing the Hershey bar … but where’s the fun in that?” –Christine Selk, The Oregonian

“A tight, incisive and darkly funny series of vignettes about mothers, wives and the people who unwittingly become them.”
—Kelly Clarke, Willamette Week

Limited edition letterpress chapbook by Cloverfield Press