letherer

It was a Tuesday night, just before Christmas, when Tammy Letherer’s husband of twelve years asked her to join him at the table, where he sat with a piece of paper and two fingers of scotch in front of him. He had three things to say: 1. He’d had an affair shortly after their wedding. 2. He’d been using escorts on business trips. 3. He was leaving her for someone he’d spent one day with in Las Vegas. Then her best friend, now a stranger, walked out the door, leaving her on the floor and their three children in their beds. In The Buddha at My Table, Letherer describes—in honest, sometimes painful detail—the dismantling of a marriage that encompasses the ordinary and the surreal, including the night she finds a silent, smiling Thai monk sitting at her dining room table. It’s this unexpected visitation, this personification of peace, that sticks with her as she listens to her husband say hurtful, shocking things—that he never loved her, he doesn’t believe in monogamy, and he wants to “wrap things up” with her in four weeks—and allows her to find the blessing in her husband’s betrayal. Ultimately, it’s when she realizes that she is participating in her life, not at its mercy, that she discovers the path to freedom.