The Wife App
A Novel
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Because every wife deserves a happy ending.
Three best friends decide they’re finally done with their ex-husbands taking their work as wives and moms for granted. They’re ready to monetize the mental load, stick it to their exes, and have a wild ride in the process in this novel that is “fresh, funny, empowering, and totally satisfying” (Judy Blume).
Lauren, mother of twins, wakes up one morning to her Wife Alarm Bells sounding. She sleuths on her husband’s phone and stumbles on a dirty secret that explodes her marriage. Madeline has it all—a penthouse apartment, a perfect daughter, and no-strings-attached romps with handsome men. But when she learns she might lose her child to her ex in England, it stirs up a decades-old personal tragedy. Sophie, with too much FOMO and never enough money, obsesses over her ex-husband’s Family 2.0—all while keeping her true desires hidden, even from herself.
It starts as a joke during a tipsy night out, as Lauren, Madeline, and Sophie rail against everything wives do for free. Let’s build an app that monetizes the mental load. And maybe revenge on our exes in the process. Soon, the Wife App is born, and before long, it’s the fastest growing start-up in New York City. But then life intervenes. Love intervenes. Ex-husbands intervene. And the consequences are bigger than anything Lauren, Madeline, or Sophie could have expected. Carolyn Mackler marks her debut into adult fiction with a rollercoaster ride of revenge and redemption that is at once a send-up of modern marriage and a celebration of female friendship and love in all forms.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Mackler's upbeat adult debut (after the middle grade novel Not if I Can Help It), three best friends monetize the domestic work done by wives and mothers. Lauren Zuckerman files for divorce after she finds out her husband, Eric, is visiting sex workers, while her divorced friend, Sophie Smart, has long moved on from her deadbeat ex, Joshua. Both men have landed on their feet—Eric is now dating the babysitter, and Joshua's new wife is documenting their lives with glossy Instagram posts. Lauren and Sophie, meanwhile, struggle to make ends meet and still perform the lion's share of parenting, and their friend Madeline Wallace, who is independently wealthy, contends with her ex's attempt to gain custody of their children. Fed up, the women create an app to "right marital inequalities" that will allow users to pay for services that often fall to mothers. As the app picks up steam, the women fend off their meddling exes and seek to define themselves as independent women. While the writing is at times didactic ("what if marriage actually started this way, with frank conversations about division of labor," Madeline wonders), Mackler identifies many real, often unspoken problems inherent in domesticity. This is worth a look.
