What’s it about?
Alice is 29, happily married, and pregnant with her first child. She’s happy about this. Which would be wonderful, except for the fact that it’s in her head – she’s really a 39-year-old mother of three and about to be divorced. She’s hit her head. Now she needs to figure out just what happened in the last ten years.
Why should you read it?
I personally will always pick up any book by Liane Moriarty because she does the PTA-mom thing so well. She gets all those power dynamics, and because that’s the world I live in, I enjoy the satirization of it. In What Alice Forgot, she also covers exercise, long-term relationships, power dynamics, and, in this case, how a friendship ruined a marriage.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about books about relationships. This is partially because of my recent foray into reading romance books. But anything that’s about relationships, particularly when there’s at least one woman involved, tends to get classified as “women’s literature” whether thats romance or chick lit. And then it can be dismissed, or treated as lesser somehow.
Any maybe this is just me being ashamed of something I shouldn’t be – maybe this is a latent, internalized misogyny on my part. (God knows I’ve found enough of that as I’ve been raising my daughter – it’s amazing where it lurks.) But I suspect it’s more than just me – that books written by women, about relationships really are marginalized. (This story on Jezebel about what happened when a female author sent out her novel under a man’s name is enlightening.) And I wish that didn’t happen.
So I will continue to read and review books by women about women and relationships. And hope it helps de-marginalize it at least a tiny little bit.