Just because I could kind of see what was coming in this literary thriller doesn't mean it wasn't still heart-stopping in its revelations. Grace Reinhardt Sachs is a mental health therapist with a practice in New York City. She and her oncologist husband are raising their only child in the same high end apartment Grace grew up in and sending him to the same exclusive private school Grace attended.
Grace's life seems to be lining up perfectly as she gets ready to publish her first self-help book on relationships. Her book is based on the premise that most people (namely women) can avoid almost all relationship/marriage problems if they could just learn to recognize red flags and warning signs at the get go. Grace recognizes that this problem usually has nothing to do with intelligence or accomplishment when it comes to these women, it's simply a sort of denial or blindness. Grace believes that women find a way to unknow what we know about partners. We turn off our own BS detectors and our natural impressions because we find someone attractive or because he's interested in us.
Grace believes that her husband Jonathon's general decency may come to harm him in some way. She recognizes that he is unable to "turn off" after work and that's why he's "fatally soft-hearted" and needs to remove himself from his family even after returning from work at the end of the day. He puts everything into his patients and their families. The fact that he's estranged from his parents and brother only point to how strong he is to have endured it. Of course, all of this information proves to be self-deluding and ironic in how it later illustrates Grace's own smugness in her perfect life.
The book that Grace wrote came to be because all kinds of women come to her AFTER they're in irreparable situations and she believes they need to hear it before. The discovery of what leads to the demise of everything Grace thought she had is all the more stunning because there are clues that Grace was privy to all through her marriage to which she chose to be blind. Therapist, heal thyself!
This is an intelligent, well-written novel of suspense and is heart-felt in its explorations of the complications of relationships and what people tell themselves to have them. Hindsight is twenty-twenty indeed.
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