You would think the story line of a wife who comes home and finds her husband has been unfaithful to be of little interest to anyone.

Except this memoir is a highly compelling and voyeuristic look inside a world of privilege and the disintegration of a relationship.

I was captured hook, line, sinker with this one. The writing is truly beautiful and the author engages the reader about her life, the tragedy, and the fallout affecting her friends, family and neighbours. It shines a light on the societal norms of the nuclear family and the class structure she experiences in her Martha Vineyard home all while with Covid lurks in the sidelines.

The author is no celebrity but she does have wealth which was taken advantage of by her philandering husband who kept his obscene hedge fund salary a secret. To be fair, she admitted she had no interest in their finances trusting him completely. And many relationships do that and it’s all fine until it isn’t. Every person should understand their financial situation and it’s got nothing to do with trust. If he’d died suddenly, she would have had to face it anyway—lesson learned.

I was captivated with this story, how the husband managed a double life and it played on my mind as to how these men actually think. We get no more of an explanation of this betrayal than Burden did. But the signs were there. He leaves the parenting to her, wants the prenup changed, convinces her that his long hours at work is for the family, agrees that her trust fund should be used to buy property in joint names without contribution from him. Is it hindsight or her ignorance about what their relationship truly looked like?

The disintegration of one woman’s life and how she picked up the pieces was engaging enough. Check this one out.