Today’s Lunch Lit has become a favorite within our department — Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon. Read the Wife 22 excerpt to discover why we enjoyed the twists and turns of this novel. It’s simply perfect or fans of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary and Allison Pearson’s I Don’t Know How She Does It. Wife 22 is an irresistible novel of a woman losing herself…and finding herself again…in the middle of her life.
When Alice Buckle, who has been married to William for nearly twenty years, receives a survey in her e-mail from the Netherfield Center for the Study of Marital Happiness, she is in the doldrums. She loves her husband but they’ve grown distant, she is bored with her job, and her adolescent children need her less now. And she has reached the age at which her mother died. So as she idly begins answering the questions, she finds herself baring her soul in an anonymous survey she never even intended to respond to. As she struggles, as “Wife 22” in the survey, to provide honest answers to the questionnaire administered by Researcher 101, she realizes it has been years since anyone asked deep, serious questions of her, and really listened to her answers. Soon her entire life as she knows it is called into question.
If you love what you’ve read so far, request a Wife 22 eGalley at Edelweiss.