73. The Husband’s Secret
Rating: ☆☆☆1/2
Recommended by: Heather Bohart
Author: Liane Moriarty
Genre: Fiction
396 pages, published July 30, 2013
Reading Format: Book
Summary
The Husband’s Secret is a suspenseful novel that, as with many Liane Moriarity books, tells the intersecting stories of several Australian women. The central character is Cecilia Fitzpatrick who, for all intents and purposes, seems to have it all. She’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. However, when rummaging through the attic she discovers a letter that is only meant to be read upon her husband’s death. She can’t help herself and reads it and discovers her husband’s secret. Once she does, not only Cecelia and her family but many of others in her community, experience life changing repercussions.
Quotes
“This was how it could be done. This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine. You ignored the deep, cramplike pain in your stomach. You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.”
“Her goodness had limits. She could have easily gone her whole life without knowing those limits, but now she knew exactly where they lay.”
“Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.”
“All these years there had been a Tupperware container of bad language in her head, and now she opened it and all those crisp, crunchy words were fresh and lovely, ready to be used.”
“None of us ever know all the possible courses our lives could have, and maybe should have taken.”
“It’s all about our egos. She felt she was on the edge of understanding something important. They could fall in love with fresh, new people, or they could have the courage and humility to tear off some essential layer of themselves and reveal to each other a whole new level of otherness, a level far beyond what sort of music they liked. It seemed to her everyone had too much self-protective pride to truly strip down to their souls in front of their long-term partners. It was easier to pretend there was nothing more to know, to fall into an easygoing companionship. It was almost embarrassing to be truly intimate with your spouse; how could you watch someone floss one minute, and the next minute share your deepest passion or most ridiculous, trite little fears? It was almost easier to talk about that sort of thing before you’d shared a bathroom and a bank account and argued over the packing of the dishwasher.”
“Marriage was a form of insanity; love hovering permanently on the edge of aggravation.”
“Polly had arrived in the world outraged to discover that her sisters had gotten there before her.”
“The words “I´m sorry” felt like an insult. You said “I´m sorry” when you bumped against someone´s supermarket trolley. There need to be bigger words.”
“When you didn’t let a woman help, it was a way of keeping her at a distance, of letting her know that she wasn’t family, of saying I don’t like you enough to let you into my kitchen.”
“She was a far better mother when she had an audience.”
“Life would go back to being unendurable, except – and this was the worst part – she would in fact endure it, it wouldn’t kill her, she’d keep on living day after day after day, an endless loop of glorious sunrises and sunsets that Janie never got to see.”
My Take
The Husband’s Secret is the second book by Liane Moriarity that I read this year (the first was Big Little Lies). Moriarity has a formula to her books. She sets up several women with intersecting lives as her characters, spends the first part of the book alluding to an event while keeping some mystery about the details of the event, and then shows how the characters lives change in reaction to the event. It’s a formula that works pretty well. Moriarity creates interesting and well developed characters and locations and the element of mystery keeps you turning the pages. I recommend The Husband’s Secret. A great read while on vacation.
