Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal by Julie Metz.
From the inside flap: “Julie Metz’s life changes forever on one ordinary January afternoon when her husband, Henry, collapses on the kitchen floor and dies in her arms. Suddenly, the mother of a six-year-old is the young widow in a bucolic small town. And this is only the beginning. Seven months after Henry’s death, just when Julie thinks she is emerging from the worst of it, comes the rest of it: She discovers that what had appeared to be the reality of her marriage was but a half-truth. Henry had hidden another life from her.”
It was the cover that first attracted me to this book: so striking, so beautiful, and betrayal? Ooh, I’m in.
Considering the inside flap goes on to mention that Henry was unfaithful throughout the marriage, I don’t think I’m spoiling too much by revealing the bulk of the book deals with Metz’s attempts to come to terms with all the mistresses. This, for me, is where the book really shines. The immediate aftermath of Henry’s sudden death is interesting, of course, in a heartbreaking way, but it’s once the truth about his affairs comes to light that things really get cooking.
This is possible only because Metz is unflinchingly open about the details – about her bottomless grief and, later, rage; about her often ugly confrontations with the other women in Henry’s life; and about her inability to let go and move on and her friends’ impatience with her to start getting her act together again.
It’s only once Metz tries to re-enter the dating pool that I began to lose interest. As glad as I was to see her making new strides and learning how to re-create her life, her candidness suddenly started to seem like oversharing. This is odd considering everything she’d laid bare in the first two hundred pages, but the details about when and where she had sex with all the men she dated was too much for me. I understand it was all part of her process, but I didn’t need to hear all the nitty-gritty details, thanks. A general allusion to her adventures in dating and, more importantly, what she learned from them would have sufficed.
The same goes for the particulars of her daily life once the crisis has passed; pages upon pages of mundane details like childcare arrangements and moving and chance encounters with old acquaintances seemed a little self-indulgent by times. That’s the danger of memoir, I guess. The final hundred pages could have easily been edited down to fifty, at most, and would have made the story that much stronger.
Still, I found the first two-thirds of the book quite gripping and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it.
Anyone have a memoir to recommend?