In the funniest, most bizarre scene in James Braly's Life in a Marital Institution, Braly's wife Susan drags him to a liberal commune in upstate New York, where she and her friends discuss whether they ate their placentas with curry or cumin — or if they simply buried them under "fertility trees." Braly's hour-long monologue is a fast-paced mix of anger, humor, and plain weirdness that outlines his tumultuous 23-year marriage. It paints a complex portrait of a love that thrives on near-betrayal, new-age mysticism, stress, and chaos — his "tantric marital arguments" revealing a tangled, beautiful mess of a relationship.