Free The Unspeakable by Meghan Daum

start time, there was exactly one person in the audience. He was maybe fortyish, skinny and pale and crowned with a yarmulke that was attached to his balding head with painful-looking pins. He was surrounded by no fewer than seventy-four empty chairs. At the back of the room was a table with Chips Ahoy cookies and a large-capacity coffee percolator.
    I thought to myself that perhaps the thing would be canceled if no one else showed up. Years ago, on a book tour, I’d arrived at a bookstore in Saint Paul, Minnesota, to find that exactly one person had come to my reading. It seemed that David Sedaris was doing a reading and book signing at the university that very same night, thereby tapping every single literary-minded person in the region and effectively making my reading the equivalent of a barely known sitcom competing with the number-one-rated show airing at the same time on another network. The person who had come turned out to be a big fan. She was a very young woman living on her parents’ farm in rural Minnesota and she’d driven an hour to see me. It was obvious that the only decent thing to do was to take her to see David Sedaris. So we got ourselves over to the university, where Sedaris’s talk was so packed we had to watch him on a Jumbotron.
    Just as I was wondering if the Marriage Project would still pay me if we canceled the show and offered to take our sole audience member to the alternate cultural event of his choice (which he would surely refuse, thereby freeing me to go home), more attendees began trickling in. There was an elderly couple and a young, twenty-something couple and a gaggle of women-of-a-certain-age whose slightly provocative attire (a leopard-print blouse here, a sequined top there) suggested this might be some kind of girls’ night out. At least half the women in the audience, which was now numbering into the low double digits, wore wigs or some other kind of head covering. At least a quarter of the entire audience, presumably members of the singles’ group, looked like they might be pushing fifty. There were patchy mustaches and ill-fitting electric-blue sweaters that could only have been purchased at T.J. Maxx by septuagenarian mothers holding out hope that their future daughter-in-law was just a J-Date away.
    I took my place at the table next to the bestselling author and the rabbi introduced us. The Marriage Project director went to the podium and reported his findings on “rates of marriage satisfaction.” He also talked about how television programs like Sex and the City glorified the single life in ultimately damaging ways. Next came the second report author, who said that most people mistakenly believe that physical attraction is the first thing to look for in a partner, when in fact research has shown that the happiest marriages are those in which sexual chemistry arises only after basic compatibility is established. The audience was attentive, if not rapt. By the time I approached the podium, I felt confident that I’d win the evening, even though the bestselling writer was speaking last. I thanked the Marriage Project guys for inviting me and the rabbi for hosting us. Then I fired up my ignition.
    I started out by saying that I was glad to see that a conversation about a “trend” was finally addressing the ways in which that trend affected the nonelite classes as well as the wine-sipping, New York Times Style-section-reading demographic that usually provides the fodder for grand pronouncements about social phenomena. I talked about how there was truth in the assertion that “Middle Americans” were often putting the baby before the bridal shower—or skipping marriage altogether—but that the reasons were likely more rooted in economics than in a desire to emulate the characters on Sex and the City . I talked about how the demise of manufacturing jobs has meant many working-class and lower-class women are the breadwinners