You Had to Be There

Tom and Nell have been married for eleven years. Tom says twenty. Nell has stopped correcting him, mostly because she isn't certain which of them is doing the remembering and which of them is doing the editing.

Then comes the weekend of a wedding: a rented house on the coast, a guest list of people who have known each other far too long, and one night that neither of them will explain afterward. What follows isn't a betrayal so much as an excavation — of the stories a marriage tells itself, of the version of a person you fall in love with, and of what happens when two people finally compare notes.

You Had to Be There is a close, funny, quietly devastating novel about the distance between the life you lived and the life you remember.