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A review by broro117
The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty
3.0
The Best Friend Reading Challenge: A New York Times Best Seller from the year we graduated high school
There are so many secrets about our lives we'll never know.
As someone who's discovered more unsettling secrets about a loved one in the past couple years than I'd ever been prepared to in the course of my lifetime and is still actively working through the resulting betrayal trauma, this book was honestly a little difficult and even triggering to read at times — but I've been trying not to hold that against it.
I will say, though, that I found the titular secret and the story behind it to be a bit lackluster and less scandalous than the summary and the lead-up to the reveal implied. It might be my fault for being desensitized, but I guess I was hoping for something more gruesome, harder to guess, and just… chewier? As it was, I thought the interpersonal dynamics explored throughout were much more interesting than the secret itself.
Overall, it's an entertaining story, but after a certain point it got fairly repetitive; I think the page length could've been trimmed down quite a bit. Also, as I previously noted in my review of The Girl on the Train, I continue to be appalled at the unrestrained fatphobia that seems to run rampant in Australian and British media. This book contains the following actual sentence: "It was as though she'd thought that Felicity's fatness cushioned her feelings, as though she believed that Felicity must surely know and accept that no ordinary man could really love her!" I mean, oof.
And one last note — I followed along with the Kindle copy as I listened to the audiobook, and I've never known the physical and audiobook editions to differ so significantly. Names were changed, sentences and paragraphs were added/omitted/rearranged, and in the most glaring instance, an entire chapter was deleted from the Kindle version.
There are so many secrets about our lives we'll never know.
As someone who's discovered more unsettling secrets about a loved one in the past couple years than I'd ever been prepared to in the course of my lifetime and is still actively working through the resulting betrayal trauma, this book was honestly a little difficult and even triggering to read at times — but I've been trying not to hold that against it.
I will say, though, that I found the titular secret and the story behind it to be a bit lackluster and less scandalous than the summary and the lead-up to the reveal implied. It might be my fault for being desensitized, but I guess I was hoping for something more gruesome, harder to guess, and just… chewier? As it was, I thought the interpersonal dynamics explored throughout were much more interesting than the secret itself.
Overall, it's an entertaining story, but after a certain point it got fairly repetitive; I think the page length could've been trimmed down quite a bit. Also, as I previously noted in my review of The Girl on the Train, I continue to be appalled at the unrestrained fatphobia that seems to run rampant in Australian and British media. This book contains the following actual sentence: "It was as though she'd thought that Felicity's fatness cushioned her feelings, as though she believed that Felicity must surely know and accept that no ordinary man could really love her!" I mean, oof.
And one last note — I followed along with the Kindle copy as I listened to the audiobook, and I've never known the physical and audiobook editions to differ so significantly. Names were changed, sentences and paragraphs were added/omitted/rearranged, and in the most glaring instance, an entire chapter was deleted from the Kindle version.
Quotes that spoke to me:
- This was how you lived with a terrible secret. You just did it. You pretended everything was fine… You somehow anesthetized yourself so that nothing felt that bad, but nothing felt that good either.
- You could spend your whole life looking at the people you loved in an oblique, halfhearted way, as if you were deliberately blurring your vision, until something like this happened, and then just looking at that person could be terrifying.
- Falling in love was easy. Anyone could fall. It was holding on that was tricky.
- That was why the sex had been so good with Connor: because they were essentially strangers. It was his otherness. It made everything — their bodies, their personalities, their feelings — seem more sharply defined, and therefore superior. It wasn't logical, but the better you knew someone, the more blurry they became. The accumulation of facts made them disappear. It was more interesting wondering if someone did or didn't like country music than knowing one way or the other.
- 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.
*Listened to audiobook