The Blight: How Dying Plants Mirror Marital Decay in “How to Stay Married”

The Blight as a Literal Phenomenon

In How to Stay Married, the blight first appears as a plain horticultural problem. During the pandemic spring, the grass around the Key home dies from the prodigious bladder of Gary, the newly adopted chocolate Lab. Harrison plants three expensive Leyland cypresses in the backyard, hoping to screen the neighbors from his naked office-reading habits, but the trees “turned sad and brown” despite daily watering. Out front, the lime tree produces withered fruit; the lemon tree refuses to bear at all. “No fruit in the streets, no fruit in the sheets,” Harrison quips, linking the physical blight directly to the couple’s sexual drought.

These failures are not accidental. Harrison waters the cypresses faithfully, yet they fail—just as he tries to nourish his marriage yet feels it withering. The blight is a concrete, observable deterioration: plants that should thrive in the Mississippi climate instead sicken and die.

Where the Blight Recurs

The motif appears most densely in Chapter 19: “This Little Blight of Mine”. There, Harrison catalogs the botanical losses alongside pandemic disorientation: “All the markers of season and ritual had been deleted from the document of experience.” The blight also appears indirectly in Chapter 14, when Harrison throws himself into yardwork after Lauren’s confession. He “lopped the lowest branches” of the pecan tree and “sliced the top third off every shrub,” imagining each cut was Chad’s head. Here the blight is not passive death but active destruction—an expression of rage displaced onto the landscape.

Later, in the final chapter, the blight recedes. The narrative no longer mentions dying trees. Instead, Harrison describes “spring” and “a miracle” of renewed family life. The blight’s disappearance signals that the emotional blight has been addressed, even if the plants themselves remain unnamed.

The Shifting Meaning of the Blight

At first, the blight is merely a strange season of failed growth. Harrison says of the lime tree, “Everything is a clue,” echoing a sermon by his pastor Soren. He begins to see the dead plants as symptoms of something deeper.

The blight evolves into a metaphor for unspoken resentment and sexual distance. Harrison notes that his weekly lovemaking with Lauren has been postponed, just as the Tokyo Summer Games were postponed. His wife “was a Leyland cypress, watered but withered.” The plants’ failure mirrors Lauren’s emotional unavailability—a condition Harrison later learns was caused by her ongoing affair with Chad.

By the memoir’s end, the blight has been transformed into a symbol of what must die for new life to emerge. Harrison writes in Chapter 38 that “the corpse of the old me is just bones now, bleaching in the front yard.” The blight of the marriage—the deadness, the rotten fruit—must be cleared away so that genuine love can take root. The physical blight is never reversed in the text; what changes is Harrison’s understanding. The plants stay dead, but the marriage revives, suggesting that the real blight was never botanical.

Character and Theme Connections

The blight is tightly bound to Harrison Scott Key’s perspective. He is the one who plants, waters, and mourns the trees. His yardwork becomes a coping mechanism, a way to physically act out his rage and helplessness. The blight also connects to Lauren Key, whose inner life is as barren as the lemon tree. She admits later that she was “withered” by grief over her mother’s death and father’s abandonment—emotional blight that predates the pandemic.

Chad is the blight’s human agent. Harrison fantasizes about beheading him with a lopper; the shrubs become Chad’s “unremarkable head.” The blight thus externalizes the intruder’s destructive influence.

Thematically, the blight speaks to infidelity as a disease that sickens everything it touches. It also evokes faith and doubt: Harrison prays for the trees, yet they die—a small crisis of faith that parallels his larger struggle to trust God and his wife. The blight is eventually overcome by a combination of humor as coping (the punchline “no fruit in the sheets”) and the slow work of forgiveness that leads to marriage redemption.

Study Questions

1. What is the literal meaning of the blight in the story?
The blight refers to dying grass, brown Leyland cypresses, and lime and lemon trees that produce no fruit during the pandemic spring. These are real, observable plant failures around the Key home.

2. How does the blight change meaning from the middle to the end of the memoir?
Initially a physical curiosity, the blight becomes a metaphor for the couple’s emotional and sexual drought. By the end, it represents the dead parts of the old marriage that must be cleared away for resurrection. The plants never revive, but the marriage does, shifting the blight from a symbol of hopelessness to one of necessary death.

3. In what way does Harrison’s yardwork in Chapter 14 connect to the blight symbol?
Harrison’s aggressive pruning—lopping pecan branches and shearing shrubs while imagining Chad’s head—is a violent response to the blight. He tries to control the landscape, just as he tries to control the chaos of infidelity. The yardwork both expresses rage and masks deeper grief, showing how the blight provokes a reactive, masculine attempt to restore order.

4. How does the blight relate to the themes of faith and doubt?
The blight tests Harrison’s faith: he waters the trees, he prays, he looks for “clues,” yet the plants die. This mirrors his doubt about God’s goodness and Lauren’s fidelity. The blight’s persistence forces him to abandon a transactional view of faith—doing the right thing does not guarantee fruit. Instead, he must learn to trust without visible evidence, a lesson that eventually deepens his spiritual life.

Conclusion

The blight is one of the most subtly powerful symbols in How to Stay Married. It is rooted in everyday domesticity—dead grass, a dog’s bladder, a failed citrus tree—yet it opens into the book’s deepest concerns: the slow decay of intimacy, the cost of secrecy, and the possibility of renewal after everything has died. Harrison Scott Key does not force the symbol on the reader; he simply records the evidence and lets the pattern emerge. As Soren said, “Everything is a clue.” The blight, once read, becomes unmistakable.