Liz Lally didn’t know that Tom was a cartoon character when she agreed to marry him—but their honeymoon, more than forty years ago, was a good first indicator. Liz’s groom had neglected to make reservations and ended up taking her to a run-down hotel with prostitutes prancing at the front door.

That was just the beginning of Tom’s morph from Liz’s Prince Charming into the goofball cartoon character everyone knows him to be today.

Here, Liz delivers laugh-out-loud, true tales about sharing a home and raising a family with a quirky man who lives by a logic all his own. Wives everywhere will commiserate when Liz awaits an intimate anniversary celebration for two as her husband coordinates a golf trip for twenty, yearns for the handyman-husband who walked through their new house decades ago and planned all the remodeling projects he’d accomplish (Tom’s first, the “playroom,” is still under construction; never mind that the “kids” are all grown and out of the house), and tries valiantly to parent three children with a man who can barely care for himself.

These are the sometimes perplexing, usually hilarious, always endearing antics of a true American character—and the wife who loves him anyway.