The Marriage Plot Keeps Getting Weirder

By Andy — 2026-08-05 — Literary News

I picked up a book last month that was supposedly about flowers. That's what the author called it, anyway, when chatting at parties.

Alysia Li Ying Sawchyn's fiancé broke off their engagement six months before the wedding, and she married a friend instead for health insurance. The book it became—I Have This Thing for Flowers—pairs each essay with a plant. But it's really about what happens when the story you were told about your own life doesn't arrive on schedule.

That book led me to a reading list Sawchyn published recently, and it made something click. These titles aren't about falling in love and getting married. They're about everything the marriage plot usually skips.

Gun-Britt Sundström's Engagement has been newly translated into English, and the novel concerns itself with a woman unwilling to marry in 1970s Stockholm. First published in 1976, it was a cult book for decades before anyone outside Sweden could read it properly. The novel takes on questions of sex, boredom, self-esteem, and whether you can treat another person the way Martina treats Gustav—a question she comes to answer with no. She can't go on exploiting him, because he's helplessly in love with her. It's about being the object of desire, not the bearer of it. Nothing remotely conventional about that.

Then there's Kelly Link. She published her first novel, The Book of Love, in 2024. It's 640 pages and could have been twee—three teenagers mysteriously resurrected in a Massachusetts town where the dead get a second crack at living. But Link writes with such control that the actual structure matters more than the romantic entanglement. The teens grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind while attempting to solve the mystery of their deaths. The book explores love in varieties—friendship, family, the sort of bond that doesn't fit neat categories. No wedding bells. No couple riding off together.

What strikes me about this list is the refusal. These books say no to the shape we've been told to want.

Sawchyn pairs each flower with a person from her life—not just romantic partners. A mother. An ex-boyfriend. A friend. She organizes her essays alphabetically according to the flowers' scientific names, which is the opposite of sentimental. It's precise. It refuses to let you collapse all love into one story.

The marriage plot survives because it's simple. Girl meets boy, obstacles arise, they overcome them, they marry. Everything else is scaffolding. But none of these authors are interested in that architecture. Sundström's novel loops back on itself endlessly—seven years, and nothing resolves into permanent commitment. Link's dead teenagers don't get to go home to sweet domestic life. Sawchyn's marriage of convenience becomes genuine in the margins, while the book obsesses over botanical detail instead.

I think what Sawchyn was getting at, listing these books together, is that the real story was always somewhere else.