I felt totally alienated from her until the moment when the ritual of getting married under the canopy was over. After that in the blink of an eye it was the best day of my life and she was the greatest person in the world and I was free. I think I needed to literally tie the knot to break out of my cynicism.

Yes, the film was around pregnancy, and just as she’d found it hard to get pregnant, I’d found it hard to get a film off the ground. So, too, when we found out the pregnancy had gone wrong, I feared for the continuation of the film as well. Romeo and Juliet and Fiddler on the Roof; Lena Dunham’s Girls and the television adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People; Slavoj Žižek; Mystic Pizza, the Before Sunset trilogy by Richard Linklater and multiple other romcoms, including Nora Ephron’s novel Heartburn and, of course, When Harry Met Sally…; Norman Rush’s Mating (the book given to me by a friend after a breakup as a way of seeing how impossible it is to make sense of love); Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse (the book recommended to me by a university professor when I was 20 years old with the promise that it would make me never want to fall in love again [I wish it had]); novels by Javier Marias and Buchi Emecheta; Ingmar Bergman’s television miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. This is an incomplete list of the cultural objects Baum writes about, exploring representations and considerations of marriage, in most of which she finds more that reflects contemporary life than one might assume. Take Romeo and Juliet, for example. Baum argues that the play’s lasting role in culture is evidence that readers recognise the teenage lovers as modern – they want to see the tragedy as related to the world they know. For culture to mirror our experiences, to teach us something about our lives, we have to read its products with modern eyes. So, when Baum writes about Fiddler on the Roof, the 1960s musical set in a Russian Jewish shtetl at the beginning of the twentieth century, it still feels like a poignant reflection on why we marry. The main character, Tevye the Dairyman, describes a young couple as ‘too happy to know how miserable they are’. Baum adds: ‘It’s precisely the sort of nostalgic line that informs more on our reality than it does on [Tevye’s eldest daughter] Tzeitel’s’. When Baum explores representations of marriage with an eye to knowing how things turn out – by which I mean, how marriage is still pervasive, how the institution hasn’t updated much beyond the concession that it fails half the time – it can be funny or tragic or both. ‘Marriage’, she writes, ‘may be one of the only things most people do that they vow, on point of entry, not to get out of alive.’ In the film Devorah plays the role of the reluctant, long-suffering wife, and she actually was that person too. The arguments between us in the film were necessarily re-enacted because if you bring out a camera during an argument it’s an escalation, it’s no longer the same argument. But they were arguments we’d just had, almost verbatim. I had to drag her into it, she resisted it, but her resistance also became part of it. Of course, to recognise this, to look inwards, you need to be feeling insecure in some way, notes Baum — “the main thing fascism sets itself up against is introspection, The fascist condemns that person who looks inwards to wonder who they really are.” It is why, she explains, the interrogation of the self is such familiar trope in Jewish literature.

Publications

I don’t watch television. When people talk about shows and I say I haven’t seen them, they ask about my stringent anti-TV attitude. The real reason I don’t watch television is I watch so much sport, if I added television series on top of that I wouldn’t have time to go to the pub, read a book or ever work. But the jokey answer I give is, ‘I’ve already been married.’ By which I mean, when my ex-husband and I ran out of stuff to talk about, we would discuss what nonsense we’d watch on Netflix, then fall asleep while watching it. Marriage,” writes Devorah Baum, in her incisive and thought-provoking interrogation of the subject, “is a formal relation that could arguably lay claim to being the world’s most enduring and universal.” It’s the plot that drives much of western literature and drama; it is presented to successive generations (especially women) as both the highest goal and a yoke of oppression. It has often been regarded as the most bourgeois and conservative of institutions, while proving flexible enough to accommodate radical reinventions. Why, then, she wonders, has there been so little serious intellectual engagement with the idea of marriage? I was so irritated at what he was making me do that I was angry enough to be perfectly capable of having our arguments again. Who speaks for identity politics? Always the other guy. Identity, for most people, isn’t political, it’s existential – a name for who and what they are. Politicisation only entrenches that fact. The more political my identity appears to you, the more existential it becomes for me.

Appignanesi subsequently finds the document and gets on a (much) later flight. But thereafter, instead of displaying remorse and contrition and generally being as supportive as he can to his wife on her big book tour, he aggressively records the tour instead. Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. She draws on a formidably broad frame of reference, from Kant to Fleabag via George Eliot and Nora Ephron, and any number of intriguing detours through less familiar literary and cinematic representations. But at the end of all her analysis, a definitive understanding remains elusive: “Having thought so much about marriage, the truth is that I still don’t know what I think about it. Pretty much all the positions I’ve encountered on the subject seem to me to have a great deal of validity.”

And while our lives have changed so much, marriage has remained pretty constant, which is why Baum’s examples can move from a Jewish shtetl to Dunham’s Brooklyn and feel consistent, related. In Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give, her actually very open-eyed celebration of marriage, writer Ada Calhoun quotes a conversation with the poet Sparrow, who says, ‘It’s kind of crazy to shop at Target, watch Netflix, drive a Honda, and still have a husband – just like females did in the eleventh century. It’s a completely antiquated setup, but no one can think of another one. Or, rather, lots of people can think of many other ones, and they all seem to work well for about two and a half years. Then they collapse.’ It’s 2017 and Baum, an acclaimed writer and associate professor in English Literature and critical theory, has just published Feeling Jewish (a Book for Just About Anyone): a brilliant guide to feelings such as guilt, hysteria, paranoia, self-hatred and other emotions stereotypically associated with Jews. Rarely has the subject of marriage been attended to with such intelligence, breadth of reading and insight, but also with such scrutiny and hope. Baum is hopeful about marriage, but also honest and anxious about it. She is committed to its contradictions and complexities. There is doubt and humility, as well as a quiet ardour to her analysis.”—Hisham Matar Baum is an erudite and entertaining guide through the landscape of marriage, bringing a lively intellectual rigour to changing attitudes on matters of religion, feminism, parenting and sexuality. . . . A fascinating exploration.”—Stephanie Merritt, The Guardian During the weeks before our wedding when he was being truly awful, I thought I’d chosen the worst person to marry – which is why it’s so interesting that I still wanted to marry him.

Husbandis cut from the same cloth, a doc in which the hapless but well-meaning Josh chronicles the book promotion process with his persistent camera, all the time feeding Devorah’s slow-burning (and justifiable) anxieties. Yeah, you’re right. I think we’ve dealt with a lot by making what goes wrong ‘part of the ceremony’ . . . we made what went wrong in the pregnancy part of the film, and we make the frictions in our relationship part of the pleasure of the relationship. And it’s done ceremoniously because often we only talk about these things when someone else is there. I’ve often noticed couples use the presence of others to enact some sort of surreptitious reconciliation work with each other. But with the film it was complicated. When he returned from Spain Josh knew, given what we’d learned was pending, that he couldn’t mention filming again. And I remember at a certain point realising that Josh was sad not only because of the loss of one of our children – possibly both – but because of the loss of his film. And realising that it was up to me to decide whether or not I’d force him to endure that loss. And because I knew the pain of the loss I was undergoing, I sensed what the prospect of that loss was for him too, though it took me quite a long time before I said we could start filming again. And it was when I made that decision that I stopped treating the film like this annoying thing, because I understood suddenly why it mattered existentially, for him as an artist and as a man. Though for me too, it became a kind of sense-making coping mechanism. Arguably, this has been going on since at least the late 18th century. The rise of the love match, if you think about it even for a moment, is nothing if not radical. You meet someone – whether through family or friends, or on holiday, or on a bus, or online – and hey, before you know it, you’re promising to spend the rest of your lives together. How on earth is that normal? It’s hardly surprising so many marriages don’t work. What’s remarkable is that so many do – some of them even happily. How? I have also given broader researched based interviews for different platforms, as here. And in October 2017 my research was the subject of a feature profile in Times Higher Education. It’s interesting that Devorah’s wanting to have children and having children has convinced you of the worth of having children, and the same has occurred in reverse for Devorah regarding your wish to make a film.

That response reminds me of the parable by Kafka about the leopards who break into the temple. The first time they’re horrified, but since the leopards keep breaking in the priests decide to make that disruption a part of the ceremony. Because to me it seems there’s something performative not only about making a film, but in the way you both speak, for example, about hating each other. I have recently codirected a second feature film with Josh Appignanesi. Husband is in its final stages of production and should be released into festivals and cinemas in 2022. The film is a docufiction/‘remarriage comedy’ portraying a marriage undergoing various stresses in a comical vein. It focuses on a trip I made to the US with my family when my first book was published.

A compulsively readable, startling, and philosophically rich book about marriage, from an acclaimed critic and filmmaker I don’t think that’s unusual. What I do think is unusual is that it’s become a subject for you. Why do you think that for you marriage is something to think about, talk about and make work about? I’ve got a book coming out, and then suddenly he’s making a film. He’s been cast in a supportive role, and it’s not one he suits easily. He likes to be the protagonist,” laughs Baum. Appignanesi laughs too. Josh sees me at my least made-up, my least attractive, and yet he’s the one who needs to feel attracted to me. And we’re both quite slovenly people. So one thing couples often do is have ‘date nights’ when they go out into the world together. And in that outing the eye of the world acts as a third character in their relationship: a character that’s intrinsic to the sexuality of their relationship. So yes, the element of exhibitionism can probably add a kind of interest. As amusing as the film is, it nevertheless asks questions of the modern world we allinhabit, not just neurotic, bourgeois types with a foot in the worlds of academia and/or film production. “How does a man, especially a white educated privileged straight man, how does he appear in storytelling?” Josh asks, articulating a 21 stCentury dilemma. “How does he appear on screen? What is it we want to hear from that guy? Or do we wanna hear from him at all?”There are no “patriarchal expectations” in a humanist marriage. That may explain why a 2019 BBC survey found that couples who’d had a humanist wedding were almost four times less likely to divorce than those who’d had a civil one, three times less likely than those who’d had a Roman Catholic one, and more than two times less likely than those who’d had a Church of Scotland marriage. Tolstoy famously found happy families alike and only the miserable ones interesting. And it does seem that he and Sofia Tolstoy had perfected the art of being deeply unhappy together in their own way. Yet unhappy marriages, as I see it, are more likely to give their game away than the happy ones, which always retain an aura of mystery. What I usually suspect of the happily married couple is that they’ve donned a cover of marital normality as a licence to withdraw from the very world that urged them into it. And I also suspect of the happy couple that, when they do step into their marriage, it isn’t merely to reproduce that world – it’s to reimagine it. However unfashionable it may be, therefore, the long term of marriage is likely to remain forever topical because marriage is one possible model (one – not the only one) for the sort of creativity and tenacious solidarity that’s surely required if we’re to face our unknown future together – for richer or for poorer, for better or for worse.