Jacob Fishman's Marriages

One couple. Two stories. One truth. Sort of. Jacob Fishman is miserable. His wife, Cindi, is miserable. His editor wants him to write another book. Suffocating in his own self-consciousness, Jacob decides to explore the frailties, fears, and deficiencies of his life with Cindi including, most tellingly, her desire to have a baby—and his desire not to. He creates Fishman doppelgängers, literary avatars, to see if their lives can be better than his. He wills himself to the intersection of truth, verisimilitude, and fantasy and finds himself paralyzed once there, no longer sure which events unfold in real life and which exist only in his book. Cindi, watching her life being laid bare, sees her husband as a megalomaniacal provocateur and chafes at his cherry-picking of their marriage and identities. Set in and around the University of Nevada, Reno, Jacob Fishman's Marriages is the story of an author’s conceit and what the creation of art excuses. It is the story of a husband and a wife and a husband and a wife—the same husband and wife. Sort of. Praise for Barry Friedman: “This masterpiece would blow away the competition, if there were competition for such a masterpiece, which there is not.”—Shane Gericke, bestselling author of The Fury “I haven’t been able to get five pages in without having to catch my breath. You’re a brave writer, my brother.”—Charles P. Pierce, Esquire “Barry Friedman has written a raw, gut-wrenching book about the game-playing side of a marriage gone wrong. But this ain’t a fairy tale. This is a brilliant look at a walk on the dark side of life.”—Jerry Izenberg, Red Smith Award-wining author of Once There Were Giants and After the Fire: Love and Hate in the Ashes of 1967 “Seeing the broken yet still beautiful world through his eyes is cathartic.”— Jennifer Taub, author of Big Dirty Money