Books like Wife, Inc.

While there are other books on the “matrimonial industrial complex,” this one provides a really in-depth analysis of the cultural fascination with weddings, and I found it an absolutely engrossing account of phenomena ranging from royal weddings to “purity porn.” 

What comes across here is the scale of the idealized wedding as a consumerist ritual and form of deep aspirational investment. One of the most thought-provoking aspects of the book is the notion that the cultural norms around weddings and marriage have slipped out of alignment so that there is a growing gap between the celebration of getting married and the state of being in a marriage.

Written long before J.D. Vance made single women an open political target, Anthea Taylor’s book propounds skepticism in regard to the frequent cliche that they are now a privileged and celebrated class.   

In fact, as she shows, this truism is part of the cultural construction of single women as a problematic population subject to evolving modes of cultural criticism and denigration. This book astutely analyzes their depiction in “chick lit,” reality tv, blogs and self-help modes. It’s smart and scholarly as well as highly readable.

For the past 25 years, romantic comedy has largely been considered a failed genre, out of sync with a new climate of uncertainty about intimacy and couplehood.

This book challenges that oversimplified view and shows how romance narratives are shape-shifting in the 21st century. Even in an era of heteropessimism, romantic comedy continues to be an important form, and the contributors here track its increasing openness to racial and sexual minorities it traditionally overlooked.

This short book covers a lot of ground and has been really influential in my thinking about the “Chick Flick” as a form of popular storytelling. It’s extremely useful for coming to grips with the genre’s conventions, and it’s open to the thematic and ideological range of a set of films that are too often written off as boilerplate and conservative.

It enables readers to see the interconnectedness of celebrated screwball comedies from the 1930s, Doris Day/Rock Hudson sex comedies, “radical” romantic comedies like Annie Hall, and contemporary “neo-traditional” romances like Sleepless in Seattle. A standout section for me is the author’s close reading of You’ve Got Mail.

Who doesn’t love the brilliant and creative Elizabeth Gilbert?

While this book is not one of her most popular, as a closeted cultural anthropologist, I found it fascinating. I loved learning all about the history of marriage, largely because it helped me to question certain assumptions we have about marriage. Assumptions that I think get a lot of us into trouble! I enjoyed how much Elizabeth shared about her own marriage and its uncoupling as well.

Elizabeth is a truth teller, and her searing honesty helped me be more honest with myself as I was processing the loss of my own marriage. 

Absorbed by Chinese culture while a grad student in Hong Kong, Susan Blumberg-Kason is charmed into marriage with Cai, a PhD student of Taoist music from the Hubei Province backwater. Marital discord arises when the openhearted Midwesterner realizes her function as a wife is to produce a son, turn it over to his (not her) parents for upbringing, and get out of the way so the husband can carry on with his philandering and porn watching. But even as he molts his intellectual shell and his narcissistic monster emerges, Cai can also be sympathetically understood as a product of his culture. Intercultural conflict is what makes this fairy tale so readable and engrossing, with its timeless theme of the loving sweetheart enthralled and entrapped in her dark prince's perverted castle. What moved me most was Blumberg-Kason’s honesty in laying everything bare, at the risk of baring her own flaws.

I found Wall’s first-hand account of what life is like inside a polygamist cult to be both revealing and tragic. The book is nonfiction but reads like a novel. I loved how the pages were full of descriptive passages that gave me an insider’s view of what these young girls are taught and must face as child brides. It helped me see that what began decades before is still happening under a cloak of secrecy. I found this book revealing and disturbing, and one I couldn’t put down.

These heart-wrenching biographies of 33 of Joseph Smith’s wives were the first, in-depth exploration of the social and emotional costs of Mormon polygamy. Loneliness appeared in 1997. The church waited until November 2014, six months after the publication of American Crucifixion, to officially acknowledge that Joseph had up to 40 wives.

For years, I had an itch to try my hand at writing, but I could never come up with a decent storyline. All my stories were in the spy-thriller genre (think John Le Carre), and they were all dreadful. While I loved the spy thriller genre, I also read a wide variety of mystery-thrillers and happened upon the book Spencerville by Nelson DeMille.

The story revolves around three characters who are caught up in a love triangle and struggle for power in a small town in the USA. I was totally captivated by the book and how a simple story involving only three main characters could be so compelling and entertaining. And, not only did I enjoy the story, but it made me rethink the kind of books I wanted to write. I moved away from the spy thriller genre and started thinking about stories I could write in a… show more.

This book about an isolated woman who gets caught up in Frankenstein’s quest to build a bride for his creation is actually more horrifying before Victor shows up.

The description of the Orkney Islands is stark and moody, infusing the story with atmosphere. The details of an 18th century woman’s life and its hazards are devastating. I sympathized with Agnes in her frustration, despair, and betrayal, and I celebrated her striving for autonomy.

Mostly, I appreciated how McGregor brought to life a narrow section of Shelley’s original story.