Smile, Everyone!

The storied American Dream includes an idyllic house with a white picket fence, a straight couple with 2.5 children, perhaps a dog frolicking in the sprinkler in the front yard. It does not usually feature a cheating husband who either comes home smelling of other women’s perfume or arrives with a six-pack of beer he works through before dinner — a stimulant that turns him mean and sometimes violent. The latter is Gloria Joyce’s life in Ashley N. Roth’s novel We Never Took a Bad Picture, and she is desperate to make it appear otherwise.

Gloria comes from a broken home with an absent father, and she longs for her girlhood dream of family life. Her husband Artie comes from an abusive household, where his drunk father beat his mother until little Artie got up the courage to defend his mom. Then his father began directing his rage toward Artie instead.

As the story shifts across time, we see young Artie living next door to a girl named Denise, who happens to be best friends with Gloria. When Gloria stumbles upon Artie taking out his anger and frustration on a wall in front of his house, the two wind up exchanging a kiss and decide to go steady. And they’ve been going — although perhaps not so steadily — ever since.

Perhaps the problems begin when they marry young, living off Artie’s simple pay as a grocery store employee. Or perhaps they start when Artie realizes Gloria cannot cook to save her life, serving him grossly under- or overcooked meals that leave him tossing out his plate and scouring the fridge for anything edible. Maybe those are the regular trials and tribulations of early marriage, and the real strife doesn’t arrive until they start trying to conceive children, something Gloria desperately wants.

Roth weaves a narrative of Gloria and Artie’s shared life and marriage, artfully transitioning from each person’s perspective in the same way she transitions between decades. We even see their relationship through their children, including their first daughter, Autumn, who provides further insights into the couple’s relationship:

Autumn looked at her mother’s face, initially feeling pity for a woman whose greatest ambition was motherhood, an ambition her body repeatedly rejected. Gloria twisted the braided belt around her waist until it looked like it would snap. The corners of her mauve lips were pinched and white. Years of bloody unborn things were etched into the whole family’s memory, even if Gloria held them front and center. Autumn had hated those babies before they were born, each one supposed to be her replacement, a chance to do better.

It’s clear Autumn has complicated feelings toward her parents, often expressing her revulsion toward them and the state of their marriage, lamenting that the pair should just give up and get a divorce already; however, when Autumn finds herself in a sticky situation, it’s her mother she turns to for help.

The novel opens in 2018, showing an aging Gloria and Artie still portraying an outwardly strong bond while Gloria plans an anniversary party and Artie struggles to stave off impending retirement. Gloria views Artie’s retirement as a sort of second honeymoon, a chance to reconnect and travel together. Artie, however, views it as the first step in a quick decline to an atrophied lifestyle, the entry to death’s waiting room. He was never a homebody. The domestic sphere is Gloria’s world, and the thought of retiring permanently from the only life he’s ever known — a professional career where he rose in ranks from a lowly grocery boy to a store manager — leaves him wishing he’d never given up drinking.

As the date of the anniversary party approaches, Gloria and Artie deal with multiple life kicks to the gut, all while trying to keep up the appearance of a happy marriage and a happy life. In addition to their current troubles, mentions of a son named Teddy who died young haunt the novel. We are given glimpses of Teddy and his brief time with Gloria and Artie, but the details of his death are not revealed so easily. What skeletons does the family have hidden in their closet, and have they managed to achieve the American Dream or only a shifting mirage, bound to fade like the morning dew?