Brian Lair on WNYC on this last day of our spring membership drive.

And during the drive, we've been featuring interesting new books from the Brian Lair show,

Spring Bookshelf during

this period, and we've got our last author with us now.

And as we approach the June wedding season, Cheryl Mendelsohn, best known for her book,

Home Comforts, the Art and Science of Keeping House from back in 1999, returns with her new book that also has kind of a domestic

theme, marriage vows. But just as home comfort was not, you know, an instruction manual on how to

use your vacuum cleaner, rather a deep, I think it was like 900 pages, dive into how we live in our domestic spaces.

Our new book Vows is not just about the words that different people say to proclaim I do,

but the very idea of coupling in something called marriage, from the earliest records of human

history to the recent renewal of marriage as cool as a result of gay marriage,

a case of the progressive world flocking to marriage rather than away from it as a chosen

lifestyle. But the words in the vows do seem to have enduring cultural meaning, even as they

have changed over time. But part of the point of the book is they've changed

surprisingly little over time. The full title of the book is Vows, the Modern Genius of an Ancient

Right. Cheryl Mendelsohn joins us now. Thanks for coming on and congratulations on the book.

Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to be here. What made you want to take a close

luck at marriage vows now? Well, I planned a general book on marriage, but when I began to work,

my, I guess, personal biography gave me specific interests, and the more I did research,

the more it concentrated on these vows that so tripped me up early in life and that I returned to later in life.

You know, I think maybe your personal story in brief is worth telling a little bit, because

as I read it, it was like your first marriage was a mistake,

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