From New York Times best-selling author Eleanor Henderson comes a turbulent love story meets harrowing medical mystery: the true story of the author's 20-year marriage defined by her husband's chronic illness - and a testament to the endurance of love.
Eleanor met Aaron when she was just a teenager, and he was working at a local record store - older, experienced, and irresistibly charming. Escaping the cliches of fleeting young love, their summer romance bloomed into a relationship that survived college and culminated in a marriage and two children. From the outside looking in, their life had all the trappings of what most would consider a success story.
But, as in any marriage, things weren't always as they seemed. On top of the typical stresses of parenting, money, and work, there were the untended wounds of depression, addiction, and childhood trauma. And then, one day, out of nowhere, a rash appeared on Aaron's arms. Soon, it had morphed into painful lesions covering his body.
Eleanor was as baffled as the doctors. There was no obvious diagnosis, let alone a cure. And as years passed and the lesions gave way to Aaron's increasingly disturbed concerns about the source of his sickness, the husband she loved seemed to unravel before her eyes. A new fissure ruptured in their marriage, and new questions piled onto old ones: Where does physical illness end and mental illness begin? Where does one person end and another begin? And how do we exist alongside someone else's suffering?
Emotional, intimate, and at times agonizing, Everything I Have Is Yours tells the story of a marriage tested by powerful forces outside both partners' control. It's not only a memoir of a wife's tireless quest to heal her husband, but also one that asks just what it means to accept someone as they are.
A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books
"Love is patient, love is kind, but in Eleanor Henderson's new memoir, love is also senseless, chaotic, pathological. You want a peek behind the curtain of someone else's marriage? Read this book. You won't be able to put it down." (Mary Beth Keane, best-selling author of Ask Again, Yes)
"Everything I Have is Yours is a gripping portrait of a marriage so full of love, chaos, and the sort of heart-breaking, head-slapping contradictions and consolations that it will leave you wondering how any of us survives the institution. Eleanor Henderson is a writer of extraordinary talent, depth, and feeling, and this memoir might be the most candid book I've ever read." (Adrienne Brodeur, best-selling author of Wild Game: My Mother, Her Lover, and Me)