Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Florida State University professor Robert Olen Butler returned to writing to question the human condition in his 2025 novel, “Twice Around a Marriage.” It tells the story of Amanda and Howard, an elderly couple forced to make sense of their shared past during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Amanda and Howard are a divorced couple who remarry, becoming trapped in a Paris apartment overlooking the Parc de Buttes-Chaumont. They pass the time telling stories about their life together and apart in an attempt to determine if their love deserves another chance. Told through alternating narratives, Butler examines the way two people can remember the same relationship in entirely different ways.
“[Amanda and Howard] are a compilation of different people and times of my life, all put into the cauldron of my imagination,” Butler said to the FSView. “That’s why it’s a compost rather than a table full of ingredients.”
Both Amanda and Howard are writers, a choice Butler swore he would never make. “Twice Around a Marriage” marks the first time he has written a novel about his two worlds colliding: that of a novelist and that of an academic.
“The last three novels I’ve written are actually combining these two forms together,” Butler said. “There are groups of stories that the characters have within themselves and, in this book, tell each other.”
‘Twice Around a Marriage’: A story of two different worlds in one marriage
A third-person narrator tracks time and moves omnisciently between the couple, contrasting their perspectives. Writing the novel required Butler to occupy two distinct voices and sustain the rhythm of a marriage in conversation.
“The writing process here involves inhabiting two different characters, both male and female, and doing so in the way they dialogue as husband and wife,” Buter said.
One of the novel’s central tensions lies in the way Amanda and Howard remember the same marriage differently. Butler said that resisting neat resolutions was essential to remaining truthful to human experience.
“The notion of resolving things too neatly is an important challenge for a writer,” Butler said. “None of us are flat characters. Our identities are made up of a nuanced and complex assortment of characteristics that are unique to literally each human being on this planet.”
Butler draws on personal experience with relationships to inform newest book
Butler, who has written more than a dozen novels and six short story collections, is best known for his book “A Good Scent From a Strange Mountain,” which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1993.
He has long grounded his fiction in what he calls the “white hot center of the unconscious,” a place he believes characters emerge fully formed rather than consciously structured with rigid outlines and a red pen.
The belief in emotional accumulation rather than design molds the novel’s characters and its approach to love itself. Butler said the decision to write a great love story later in life was inseparable from his own lived experience — he has been married six times and entered each marriage expecting it to last forever.
“Later in life means I’ve had a great deal of experience with relationships,” Butler said. “People age with each other, and they try to build a life that will work. But if you are complex people, or creative people, as most of my partners have been, you are sometimes only meant for each other for a certain number of years.”
This philosophy is central to “Twice Around a Marriage,” which imagines what happens when two people in their 70s reunite after years of divergence. Butler connects that idea directly to his teaching style, which emphasizes selfhood as the deepest objective of both life and fiction.
“The fulfillment of self, as I preach in my pedagogy of creative writing, is the ways in which a couple mutually brings out and enhances both shared and separate paths toward selfhood,” Butler said. “At some point, that ends.”
Kierra Keegan is a Staff Writer for the FSView & Florida Flambeau, the student-run, independent online news service for the FSU community. Email our staff at contact@fsview.com.
This article originally appeared on FSU News: Robert Olen Butler returns to writing with ‘Twice Around a Marriage’
Reporting by Kierra Keegan, Staff Writer, FSView / FSU News
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