The Maps They Gave Us

Welcome to Will and Grace with kids, cats, and a mortgage.

In a memoir that celebrates the creative possibilities of intimate relationships, writer and psychotherapist Wayne Scott’s The Maps They Gave Us: One Marriage, Reimagined is an unlikely love story: a distraught couple with three school-aged children, on their way to get a divorce, are surprised when they fall in love again.

In a voice at once vulnerable, tender, lucid, and funny, Wayne Scott offers the perspective of a queer (bisexual) man in a mixed-orientation marriage. After the couple separate, stunned and careening toward divorce—the expected outcome—they find themselves in a tiny room with a quirky and compassionate relationship therapist who offers them a challenge: find a “common story” about what brought them together to help them navigate the next iteration of their relationship.

Wayne Scott’s marriage memoir will appeal to readers who loved the messy rawness and emotional complexity of Noah Baumbach’s film Marriage Story —suffused with a more expansive sense of possibility and hope.