Behind the Smiling Faces contains advice, instruction, and experiences from eleven marriage and counseling professionals and over eighteen “ordinary” Latter-day Saint couples. Even if the title is misleading and the book’s scope is very broad, the wide-ranged and varied content of Behind the Smiling Faces accomplishes the goal of the authors to represent the “people” we see all the time—“the men and women who worship with you on Sunday. . . . your family and friends. . . .[or] even you” and how “some . . . smiles reflect and inner peace and joy” while other “smiles mask . . . pain” (11).My assumption in reading the title of this book, and seeing the cover photograph, was that it would be a depressing soapbox about how the common LDS view of the importance of a “perfect” marriage is flawed. This assumption was incorrect. Instead, this book is a compilation of information striving to demonstrate the realities of marital challenges and joys in an LDS context.
What’s the difference? For the most part, Behind the Smiling Faces is very encouraging, despite what the cover art depicts. I loved reading the advice from LDS marriage and counseling professionals included in Behind the Smiling Faces, many of whose books I have also read or heard of.
The biggest problem I found with this book is the scope is extremely broad. At first I felt like the book was written for people preparing for marriage, then for people who were married and needed advice and encouragement (don’t we all?), then for people who were thinking about divorce, and then for people who have already gone through a divorce. Because Behind the Smiling Faces tries to cover all of these circumstances, I wouldn’t feel comfortable giving it to anyone in any of those groups. For example, the divorce parts would be big downers for people preparing to get married, and the marriage prep advice would be salt in the wound for recent divorcees.
Thus the only audience that Behind the Smiling Faces fits is marriage enthusiasts, like the authors, professionals quoted in the book, and anyone else interested in learning everything the authors could think to include about an LDS perspective on marriage, but readers would need to be without any severe emotional ties to the topic.
I was also disappointed that most of the book is in interview format—questions followed by answers. I would prefer that the marriage and counseling professionals and interviewed couples would have just written their own chapters instead of the authors breaking up what they have to say.
Behind the Smiling Faces is far from a bad read, but it is confusing. Reading the author’s preface, “Words to the Why’s” (besides the fact that it should be "Whys") is definitely essential and helped me realize what the book was trying to do. I loved the compilation-type content from LDS marriage and counseling professionals as well as the real-life stories from couple interviewees, but because Behind the Smiling Faces tries to cover too much it’s not quite right for any specific audience.
It was a terrible day. I woke up at five in the morning aching all over and with a terrible sore throat. It was two days before Christmas, my Christmas—the Christmas I had been waiting to start remembering my whole life: my husband and my first Christmas, one day before our seven-month anniversary.
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