Wife in the North
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Judith O'Reilly, a successful journalist and mother of three, agreed to leave London for a remote northern outpost, she made a deal with her husband that the move was a test-run to weigh the benefits of country living. In the rugged landscape of Northumberland County, O'Reilly swapped her high heels for rubber boots and life-long friends for cows, sheep, and strange neighbors.
In this tremendously funny and acutely observed memoir, O'Reilly must navigate the challenges and rewards of motherhood, marriage, and family as she searches for her own true north in an alien landscape. Her intrepid foray into the unknown is at once a hilarious, fish-out-of-water story and a poignant reflection on the modern woman's dilemma of striking the right balance between career and family.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Remembering I Don't Know How She Does It, O'Reilly does her best impression, via blog, of Allison Pearson's overworked working mom in this collection of posts from the last three years of her life. As with Pearson's book, it has its charms and demerits. In a book too long by 100 pages, O'Reilly again and again makes the point that she did not wish to leave her London home to live in rural Northumberland, but her husband did: "He thinks it is spiritual home; I think it beautiful but bleak and chill and nowhere that I want to be." This whiny refrain quickly becomes irritating, and the short-entry format keeps the reasons behind that move (and O'Reilly's resentment) from ever being fully explored. O'Reilly's husband is a cipher, whose motives are never satisfactorily explored (after moving his family far away, he promptly goes back to work in London for weeks at a time). Much better, especially for Anglophile Americans, is when the author steps out with her new country neighbors, going on hunts and shearing sheep; O'Reilly's three children and, especially, her aging mother, also burst forth vibrantly, the product of loving examination.
