Join McIntyre’s Books for Tommy Hays, The Marriage Bed, in conversation with Elaine Nell Orr on Sat, May 2, 11am-12pm. This free event takes place indoors. Free parking is available on-site. The space is wheelchair accessible. No pets allowed. Fearrington Village is part of the Chatham County Craft Beverages & Country Inns Trail. See more events at Fearrington Village.

BOOK SUMMARY

A poetry professor at a small college in Asheville, NC, Asa Flowers, comes home one stormy evening to find his wife, Betsy, inexplicably distraught. As the evening goes on, the couple ends up in a heated argument that sends Asa to sleep out in their garage apartment for the first time in twenty-five years of marriage. The next morning, he wakes to blue sky and an altered world.   

Unfolding over a few tense weeks and told from multiple points of view, this novel explores how a tragedy can assume as many shapes as the people it touches. Asa finds himself reckoning with torn feelings about his marriage and confusion about how to proceed in his complicated relationships with his adult children. As he gradually absorbs revelations—so much he didn’t know or understand during his long marriage—he finds himself drawn uneasily toward a new world, one in which he must shed much of his old identity if he is to survive and, more important, rededicate himself to being a father. 

AUTHOR BIO

Tommy Hays is an acclaimed Southern writer, whose fiction grows out of his emotional connections to places he’s lived and known—Greenville, South Carolina; Asheville, North Carolina; and Atlanta. His novels are The Pleasure Was Mine, In the Family Way, Sam’s Crossing, and YA novel What I Came to Tell You. He has published stories, profiles, and book reviews in magazines, newspapers, and literary journals such as Redbook, Our State, The Atlanta Constitution, The Charlotte Observer, Smoky Mountain Living, Still: The Journal, The Chattahoochee Review, and storySouth. The winner of many literary awards, he is the founder and former Executive Director of the Great Smokies Writing Program, UNC Asheville’s community writing program, as well as Lecturer Emeritus in the Master of Liberal Arts program.