"The humorist Erma Bombeck, a friend of his from Dayton, described Mr. Donahue as 'every wife’s replacement for the husband who doesn’t talk to her.'"

"By 1979, the show was reaching 9 million viewers, nearly 8 million of them female.... Over the years, he interviewed late night host Johnny Carson, pop star Elton John, boxer Muhammad Ali, anti-apartheid leader Nelson Mandela, comic filmmaker Mel Brooks, and tennis rivals Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs. Some of his more controversial guests included Albert Speer, Adolf Hitler’s architect; novelist Ayn Rand; Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan; Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke; and porn star Harry Reems.... Mr. Donahue never claimed to be impartial. He was a strident liberal — his most frequent guest was Ralph Nader, whose presidential campaign he later supported. He belonged to the National Organization for Women, attributing what he described as his sexism early in life to his religious education. 'We were so busy trying to avoid sin that we could never make friends with women, never share ideas, never care how they felt,' he told TV Guide in 1978."

From "Phil Donahue, long-reigning king of daytime television, dies at 88/His award-winning show tackled tough social and political issues but also pioneered a breezy format that opened the door to successors like Oprah Winfrey" (WaPo)(free access link).

"[T]he relationship at the very center of the story [is] a marriage between a neurotic perfectionist and a formidably patient man with much to criticize about him..."

"... from an annoyingly 'phlegmy' throat to a similarity to 'a heap of laundry: smelly, inert, useless, almost sentient but not quite.' And these are just his physical faults — or at least a sampling of them. Bill’s putative mental and emotional shortcomings could themselves fill a book. And they very nearly do. That the author has made her particular disgusts (and her generous way of occasionally overlooking them) the basis for a general treatise on matrimony is the abiding problem of 'Foreverland.' How well can an institution be explained by a single instance of it, and especially by one beset with problems that aren’t necessarily widely shared? Quite well, Havrilesky seems to feel, or else she wouldn’t start so many sentences with sweeping prefaces such as 'Marriage is' or 'Having a baby means' or 'The suburbs are' followed by blanket statements of what they are.... 'The suburbs are a place where people go to embrace the dominant paradigm, because the dominant paradigm makes them feel safe and comfortable.' A dominant paradigm? In today’s America?"

Writes Walter Kirn, in "Heather Havrilesky Compares Her Husband to a Heap of Laundry" (NYT)(reviewing "FOREVERLAND/On the Divine Tedium of Marriage").

I'm reading between the lines that Havrilesky is going for humor of the sort once purveyed by Erma Bombeck.