Another example of a book that got on my list somehow. I was at the library, trying to find something (unwarlike) for a weekend plane ride. And this was what was on the shelves. Of course, then I stuck to Thucydides on the plane, so got to this almost a week after I got back.
But then I blew through it. I didn't want to put it down.
Wife 22 is Alice, a Bay Area woman approaching a mid-life crisis. At the same time, her husband and children are having crises of their own. In her free-wheeling state of wondering what comes next, she finds an invitation in her spam folder to participate in a marriage study. The questions are open-ended (the researcher assigned to her case compares his job to what they do to songs at Pandora) and cover the past, the present, and the future. And as she goes through, her interactions with the researcher get increasingly personal.
Chapters are usually short, and the plot is presented in a variety of forms: first-person narrative, texts, emails, survey responses (without the questions!), and playwritten scenes. It's a difficult gimmick to pull off without feeling gimmicky, but I felt like it worked here, even when some of the social media facts felt un-true.
Don't want to give much more away, but I was enraptured by this tale of how a life and a love look from outside and from within.
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