The Wife's Tale - by Lori Lansens (Paperback)

About the Book

On the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, Mary Gooch's handsome husband Jimmy fails to come home. Mary wonders whether her size or her aversion to adventure chased him off. With few clues, she ventures to California in search of her husband. What she discovers is as shocking as it is delightful: a new vibrant energy--and an entirely different kind of hunger.

Book Synopsis

On the eve of their Silver Anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband Jimmy -- still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school -- to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search.

For the first time in her life, she boards a plane and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary finds that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she finds fills her with inner strength she's never felt before. Through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.

Review Quotes

"A sensitive but deliciously comic account of Mary's fight against the "obeast" that has lived inside her since childhood, The Wife's Tale offers more than self-­improvement: there are loving reflections on marriage and family in small-town Ontario, hilarious travelogues about American obsessions like McMansions and vanity license plates, and a tender documentary of the improbable compassion of strangers for fellow travelers. Of course, there's plenty of self-discovery too.... Lansens has more than a few tales worth telling."--Casey Cep, New York Times Sunday Book Review

"Lansens--who lived so memorably inside the heads of conjoined twins Ruby and Rose in The Girls--sketches another indelible female character here. Mary Gooch... [is] original... heartbreakingly funny and sad."--Entertainment Weekly

"Lansens' clear prose unveils the connection between a body weighed down by flesh and a spirit smothered by loneliness. Mary's odyssey of heartache and hope is not so much about finding her husband as it is about rediscovering herself."--People

"Lansens's hopeful and gentle third novel (after The Girls), opens in the same fictitious Ontario county as its predecessors, but the heroine's journey takes her to a vastly different landscape, both literally and spiritually... Mary Gooch's [is] a wonderful character, and Lansens's handling of her eventual transformation into someone capable of compassion and acceptance is handled with a light but assured touch."--Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Lori Lansens has written several films and is the author of the novel Rush Home Road. The Girls is her second book. She lives in Toronto.