REVIEW: My Husband

Loving your spouse too much isn’t a crime. It’s not like an unrequited crush, creepy and one-sided; this person chose to marry you! But the way Maud Ventura describes the main character’s marriage in her sensational novel My Husband slides into the obsessive, with the unnamed, perfect husband seemingly unaware of the ways the wife alters and arranges herself into the person she thinks he wants. Everything she does, everything she thinks about is related back to her husband. Any decisions, feelings, inane thoughts all lead back to him. She has built her world around him, giving him children she couldn’t care less about and making her English students read and analyze the story of their lives.

The wife is under the impression that her husband will only stay with her as long as she curates herself like a museum. He never sees her without makeup, she uses the bathroom in secret, and he has absolutely no idea that she is not a natural blonde. The wife picks apart their marriage, desperate (and afraid) to see the flaws and cracks that feel inevitable to her. Her work as a translator forces her to pick apart nuances in phrasings, which she carries back to her home life, poking and prodding to see if the sweet-smelling clementine of their marriage has bruises inside.

Ventura follows the couple for a week, each chapter a day, and the wife’s insanity unfolds. The more she loves him, the less she thinks he loves her. She punishes him in increasingly jawdropping ways, but none of that prepared me for the ending. I would say more, but you honestly just need to read it yourself. Highly recommend if you loved Gone Girl, the short story The Yellow Wallpaper, or if you have mildly obsessive tendencies.

RATING: ☆☆☆☆