Still Life With Husband
-
-
4.0 • 1 Rating
-
-
- $12.99
-
- $12.99
Publisher Description
A funny and heartbreaking tale of thirty-ish life.
Emily is a perfectly normal, loveable and flawed character who crosses a line some would see as unforgiveable, and risks everything she has to find out what she really wants.
This is a funny and heartbreaking tale of thirty-ish life. Emily Ross is thirty and has a good life. She is married to Kevin - they hooked up nine years ago at college and have now been married for five years. He is a doting, responsible and loving husband. Emily's best friend Meg is the perfect best friend; funny, smart, available and always there. Emily has a steady stream of freelance writing jobs and a permanent part-time editing job and she happily lives in an apartment in the city. Some would call this the perfect life but it is hardly exciting.
Then Kevin begins to insist on moving to suburbia and starting a family, and Meg gets pregnant and wants their children to grow up together. Emily struggles with these changes and decisions and questions whether or not she wants the picture-perfect life. Enter David Keller, a handsome writer who works for the local alternative newspaper, who asks Emily out on a date. Emily impulsively answers yes, and despite vowing to do so every time they meet or email, finds herself unable to tell David she is married. They stumble into a full-blown affair. But is sex with someone new really the answer to Emily's dissatisfaction? And what about sweet and kind Kevin, who, despite her infatuation with David, she still loves?
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Yes, it's an affair novel, but file this adroit but placid debut under chick lit for early marrieds the ones who are not sure they want to be on the baby-house-'burbs track. At 30, Emily Ross is a Milwaukee freelance writer with a part-time job as assistant editor at a medical journal called Male Reproduction and a marriage to "steady, staid" Kevin, a technical writer she met in college. Kevin, "innocent and intolerable," wants a baby and a house. Emily is ambivalent and bored. A few pages in, Emily meets David Keller, a dark, good-looking writer/editor at the local alternative newspaper, and starts an affair. Things, as expected, do not go well, but Fox's voice is steady, moving easily between comedy and drama. Her emotionally literate delineation of character and relationship give the book texture, with Emily's relationship with her best friend, Meg, emerging as the book's most resonant. Fox draws just the right tension out of Emily's mix of honesty and self-delusion, reflection and romance, with an undercurrent of a sort of left-handed hope. For anyone who's lived through a relationship drama, though, Emily will have a decidedly entitled, gee-whiz quality that's hard to take.
