In A Marriage in Startled Air , Patricia Foster shares the dramatic story of how the diagnosis of her husband’s rare cancer changed the dynamics of their marriage and opened the door to the hidden world of his childhood, revealing the seeds of trauma and childhood PTSD. In vivid, often poetic prose, Foster reflects on how the journey of recovery—and discovery—between two artists in a relatively happy marriage leads to difficult conversations about family, memory, identity, and aging. Within this unburdening, Patricia and David discover a new map of intimacy: Once the illusion of normalcy is broken, what emerges is something sweeter and deeper, as if the broken thing becomes, ironically, the healing thing.