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Summary
Summary
Jen Waite was faced with so many questions when she began to realize that her loving husband fits the textbook definition of a psychopath. In a raw, first-person account, Waite recounts each heartbreaking discovery, every life-destroying lie, and reveals what happens once the dust finally settles on her demolished marriage. With a dual-timeline narrative structure, we see Waite's romance bud, bloom and wither simultaneously, making the heartbreak and disbelief even more affecting.
Author Notes
Jen Waite lives in Maine with her young daughter.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In this emotionally charged memoir, Waite, who lives in Maine with her daughter, describes how the man she married turned out to be not at all what he seemed. Waite details the unraveling of their five-year romance in a powerful narrative. Waite was a waitress in her 20s when she fell in love with Marco, the bar manager where she worked. She believed she'd found her soul mate even though he had a child before meeting her from another relationship and was working in the country illegally. They married, he got a green card, and she used her savings so that they and some friends could open a restaurant. But soon after giving birth to their daughter, she found a suspicious email from her husband to another woman. He denied having an affair and told her that something was very wrong with him psychologically: he'd stopped feeling anything. Exhausted and confused, she retreated to her parents' house to figure out what was making him sick. She couldn't help continuing her detective work, going through phone records and emails. As she researched his changing behavior, the truth about her relationship was revealed. She realized, with the help of a therapist, that she'd been in love with a liar and a psychopath. Waite's is a well-written and at times gripping story of deceit. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Waite believed she had found her soul mate when she met Marco at the restaurant where they both worked in New York City. Five years later, shortly after their daughter is born, Waite finds a suspicious e-mail referencing a girlfriend. When she confronts Marco, he claims exhaustion and mental-health issues. His behavior turns cold and detached. Escaping to her parents' house in Maine, Waite tries to parse out the truth, wishing for the old Marco and frightened by this new one. She begins to realize that her marriage has never been what she believed and that Marco was never the person she thought. Chapters reflect her struggle, alternating between Before and After, and her writing is conversational and dialogue-heavy. The style serves her well as she intimately shares with readers her experiences of both falling in love and realizing, terrifyingly, that Marco might be a psychopath. In the kind of story usually found in true crime or suspense, Waite authentically voices her trauma and recovery.--Sexton, Kathy Copyright 2017 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
For better and for worst: One new account offers lessons in love, while two others document its horrors. MARRIAGE TAKES WORK. We know, we know! But how do you tell the difference between the work required of any committed relationship and a life sentence of hard labor? A realist might say that if you're happy 51 percent of the time then you're ahead of the game, though anyone who's faced such a conundrum knows it's hard to apply a metric to domestic despair - or bliss, for that matter. This summer, two memoirs about marriages that take abrupt and chaos-inducing turns may instill a new appreciation for the placidity (or monotony) of your own partnership. A third book, which attempts to uncover the secrets of lasting intimacy, leaves readers with more questions than answers, but that's pretty much the idea. MY LOVELY WIFE IN THE PSYCH WARD: A Memoir (Harper Wave/HarperCollins, $25.99) began as a much talked about Modern Love column in The New York Times in 2011 and was expanded for Pacific Standard in 2015, where it became one of that magazine's most read articles of the year. Mark Lukach begins with a breezy and too-good-to-be-true summary of his early years with Giulia, a magnetic and ambitious Italian he met when both were freshmen at Georgetown University. Whereas Lukach is a laid-back surfer who teaches high school and coaches sports, Giulia is career-driven, corporate-minded and determined to micromanage her destiny. They seem like the perfect - and perfectly complementary - couple. And they are dizzyingly happy. But at 27, three years into the marriage and a few weeks into a new job, Giulia begins to experience severe anxiety that rapidly merges with suicidal depression. Within a month, she has entered into full-blown psychosis, insisting that she's talking to the Devil, who's sending her apocalyptic messages. Lukach and his father-in-law have no choice but to pick Giulia up and physically force her into the car to take her to the hospital. When she refuses to enter on her own, Lukach threatens to call the police. After six hours in the emergency room, Giulia is sent home with new medication, but a few days later she's back in the E.R. and this time admitted to a psychiatric unit in another part of the city. It will be the first of three such hospitalizations over five years, one of which comes shortly after the birth of the couple's son. At home, Lukach is Giulia's primary caregiver, one whose heroic rise to the occasion does not preclude moments of frustration and even rage. When the psychosis tapers off, depression takes its place and Lukach not only has to hide Giulia's medication so that she doesn't overdose in an attempt to kill herself but also inspect her mouth to make sure she's swallowed what she's supposed to. You can hardly blame her for resisting. The medication causes her to gain 60 pounds in two months and makes her sluggish almost to the point of immobility. When lithium is added to the mix in an effort to quell the depression, it leaves her, Lukach writes, "in the most stilted and zombified state yet, her arms frozen stiff at her sides, her fingers spread apart, her lips pursed, drool sometimes lingering at the corners of her mouth." This a harsh image for any memoirist to render, let alone a husband writing about his wife. But Lukach's rare combination of tenderness and ruthlessness is what makes this book more interesting than your typical illness narrative. His love for Giulia is apparent on every page, but he also hates her in moments and is willing to show us why. When depression finally lifts and Giulia is "better," she's so busy enjoying life again that she can't be bothered to do anything around the house, nor does she show much appreciation for everything Lukach did for her. You want to shake some gratitude into her, but you also want Lukach to stop coasting on martyr fumes. Fortunately, he's an honest enough writer to quote the therapist who invites a shift in thinking: "Sacrifice is a part of love, Mark. But might there not be more to love than just how much you sacrifice?" This kind of self-scrutiny is nowhere to be found in Jen Waite's husband, Marco, a handsome Argentine bartender who swept the author off her feet and was later discovered to be a liar and philanderer of towering proportions. In a BEAUTIFUL, TERRIBLE THING: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal (Plume, $25) Waite retraces her steps through a relationship that first gives her the "strange sensation of seeing the world in color for the first time" but eventually reveals itself to be a series of setups at the hands of a master manipulator. Organized into alternating chapters entitled "Before" and "After," the memoir is a study in "gaslighting" - making someone feel that she is crazy or only imagining things. Just three weeks after the birth of the couple's daughter, Waite stumbles on clues that Marco is involved with another woman. The evidence, much of it in the form of telltale emails, Facebook messages and GPS data, is too glaring to deny, though Marco denies it anyway with methods that range from suggesting his wife has postpartum paranoia to attempting suicide (or pretending to; it's not quite clear) amid an apparent psychotic breakdown. Along the way, Waite doubts herself - "maybe because he's so overtired and overworked he's making really bad decisions and doesn't realize how inappropriate his behavior is" - until she can no longer ignore the facts: She married a man who may well be a sociopath. Waite has a knack for showing the ways that cognitive dissonance can chart pathways in the mind that cause emotional confusion to obscure rational thought. But once we grasp the scope of Marco's deceptions, "A Beautiful, Terrible Thing" starts to sound in places like a friend who's been complaining about her bad relationship for years but does nothing about it. This is due mostly to excessive rehashing on the page, since once Waite makes up her mind to leave Marco she is nothing if not proactive in her efforts to make a life for herself and her daughter on their own. By the end, she has decided to pursue a degree to become a therapist specializing in women recovering from sociopathic relationships. Maybe that's why the book works best when Waite is sharing what she learns about destructive personality disorders and what makes certain people vulnerable to those that have them. After all, there's only so much you can hear about a 22-year-old's Instagram posts or the contents of a cheating spouse's email. As it happens, one of the emails that Waite finds from Marco to his girlfriend (she knows his password; talk about the illusion of trust) contains a link to an article called "36 Questions That Can Make Two Strangers Fall in Love." These questions, devised by a psychologist looking to see if a laboratory experiment could make two people fall in love, are in fact the basis of yet another Modern Love column that became a book. In HOW TO FALL IN LOVE WITH ANYONE: A Memoir in Essays (Simon & Schuster, $26), Mandy Len Catron, who became a TED talk sensation on the heels of her Modern Love success, employs a combination of personal history, family history and social research to try to figure out what makes love last over time. That approach would seem to carry the promise of the kind of lofty self-help literature in the Alain de Botton vein. But despite Catron's obvious intelligence, she comes off as surprisingly unsophisticated. The myths she sets out to bust - the Cinderella story, the idea of happily ever after, the "tyranny of meeting cute" - are chestnuts long ago pulverized in the public consciousness, and it's unclear what new insights she's trying to bring to the table. The 36 Questions, on the other hand, are as intriguing as ever. Catron reprises her Modern Love essay here and includes all the questions in a separate chapter. They're a slow climb up a steep hill. "What would constitute a 'perfect day' for you?" gives way to "If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?" It gets even scarier from there. The crystal ball question took me back to Lukach, whose book may be finished but whose uncertain life with Giulia continues. Would the couple have wanted to know their fate from the beginning? If they'd known, would they have married anyway? "With one word, I had lost my wife and gained a lifelong patient," Lukach writes of hearing the word "schizophrenia" applied to her for the first time. It sounds ominous, but aren't all life partners also lifelong patients in a sense? The work of a long-term committed relationship is essentially the work of keeping someone alive in the ways necessary to ensure that you're kept alive in return. That's a pretty heavy lift - and no two couples carry quite the same load - but it's still nice work if you can get it. And a small miracle if you can get it right even 50 percent of the time. MEGHAN DAUM'S latest book is "The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion." Her column appears every eight weeks.
Kirkus Review
A woman discovers her husband is not whom she thought he was.Waite met Marco at work; he was the new bar manager, and she was working as a waitress "to make the money that did not seem to be materializing from my acting and modeling careers." They went out for drinks even though Waite had a long-distance relationship with another man. "He was sexy and mysterious and all of a sudden I wanted him more than I had wanted anything in my life," she writes. Before long, they were a couple and moved in together; she agreed to help fund Marco's lifetime dream of opening a restaurant; they got pregnant and married. Then their perfect life fell apart when Waite discovered Marco was cheating on her and had been for quite some time. Alternating between two time framesbefore finding out about the affair and afterthe author slowly unravels the complexity of lies and disillusions she suffered because of Marco. The tension, disbelief, and grief permeate the pages as Waite chronicles how she obsessively checked Marco's email and Facebook accounts for proof of his infidelity. The author makes palpable her inability to cope with the enormity of her situation and the confusion and fear for what a divorce would mean for her newborn child. Her recounting of the events gives readers an up-close look at the psychological damage that occurs when one partner falls completely for another and ignores the gut instincts and warning signs that the relationship may not be what it seems. Those who have been in a manipulative partnership with a narcissistic or abusive person will find Waite's honest retelling relevant and potent. Many will find they can use this as a guidebook of what to watch out for so they don't make the same mistakes that the author did. A frank and visceral dual timeline shows the romance and failure of a woman's marriage to a psychopath. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
