Morality Tale

Sylvia Brownrigg is the author of a collection of stories, Ten Women Who Shook the World, and the novels Pages for You and The Metaphysical Touch. She has a degree in philosophy from Yale University and lives in Berkeley, California.

"Morality Tale" is a novel about the triangular complications of a modern marriage and the comedy that flows from them. When the elusive but exciting Richard (an envelope salesman with a nice layperson's line in Zen philosophies) meets this novel's narrator, he offers her a friendly escape from her own daunting domestic life. Burdened by her husband's ongoing negotiations with his angry ex-wife, the strains of looking after two stepchildren, and the lingering ghost of her own past betrayals, she finds that the life of a "second marryer" leaves much to be desired. As her friendship develops with Richard, so grows the shadow cast over her marriage by his presence, and when they make a late, illicit bay crossing together on a ferryboat, the story gathers momentum under California's Mount Tamalpais. There, in the fabled Golden State, Sylvia Brownrigg shows how even a layperson's Zen can lead to some important revelations about the need to look forward, not back. Told with unwavering honesty and wit, "Morality Tale" explores what it means to be married a second time around--and the crucial universal truth that change is often the key to staying together.