Name: The wife
ISBN: 0786257687

Meg Wolitzer

The wife

The Wife

Wynter

Everyone needs a wife; even wives need wives. Wives tend, they hover. Their ears are twin sensitive instruments, satellites picking up the slightest scrape of dissatisfaction. Wives bring broth, we bring paper clips, we bring ourselves and our pliant, warm bodies. We know just what to say to the men who for some reason have a great deal of trouble taking consistent care of themselves or anyone else. “Listen,” we say. “Everything will be okay.” And then, as if our lives depend on it, we make sure it is.

This book reminded me of the film Big Eyes, where a woman falls victim to her own sense of wifely duty and sacrifices her talents to raise up those of her husband. Written in the prose that begs to be quoted, Meg Wolitzer's family drama is a decadent literary desert to be savored and deconstructed into gourmet ingredients. Whoever thought of comparing egoistical self-absorption to a fetus curling into itself? Wolitzer - the imagery genius.

Meg Wolitzer'sprevious books includeSleepwalking, This Is Your Life,andSurrender, Dorothy.She lives in New York City with her husband and two sons.

A Novel

Jayme Bosio

I read Female Persuasion last year, and thought it was a good book, but had no interest in really reading any of her other titles. The only reason I picked up The Wife is that I really want to see the movie, but wanted to read the book first. And The Wife is also a good book. But...

I wasn't even going to write a review - just pick my four stars and move on - but it was bothering me that this book didn't move me in any way. It is like looking at a beautiful painting. Yes, it is technically beautiful, the use of color and shading is perfect, blah, blah, blah. And, yet, you feel nothing. 

Her writing is excellent. Her description of a fed-up woman is spot on. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to read a good story. Still...I'm kind of frustrated that I didn't connect with this book. Am I dead inside?

Now a major motion picture starring Glenn Close in her Golden Globe–winning role! One of bestselling author Meg Wolitzer’s most beloved books—an “acerbically funny” (Entertainment Weekly) and “intelligent…portrait of deception” (The New York Times). The Wife is the story of the long and stormy marriage between a world-famous novelist, Joe Castleman, and his wife Joan, and the secret they’ve kept for decades. The novel opens just as Joe is about to receive a prestigious international award, The Helsinki Prize, to honor his career as one of America’s preeminent novelists. Joan, who has spent forty years subjugating her own literary talents to fan the flames of his career, finally decides to stop. Important and ambitious, The Wife is a sharp-eyed and compulsively readable story about a woman forced to confront the sacrifices she’s made in order to achieve the life she thought she wanted. “A rollicking, perfectly pitched triumph…Wolitzer’s talent for comedy of manners reaches a heady high” (Los Angeles Times), in this wise and candid look at the choices all men and women make—in marriage, work, and life.

Lauren Tabor

I was severely bored by this entire book. I don't know if it was the intent to figure out the "plot twist" near the beginning of the book but either way that gave me no real motivation to continue reading because I could basically see how the whole book would go. I did end up finishing the book just because it was so short and I thought maybe more would happen. The whole idea of this book was really intriguing

a novel

Donald

Holy shit - THE ENDING. Read this book and talk to me about it because I can't write about it without writing about the ending, which would ruin it for you.

Lauren Attaway

A remarkable book about loving artists, supporting artists, and the insanely unfair differences between male and female artists.

Arden Kowalski

Excellent novel, and Wolitzer's prose is something to be emulated. My only issues are the printing of the word antisemitism (printed with a hyphen when there shouldn't be) and the crass nature of certain aspects of Joan's narration.