The Wife's Tale

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Overview

Mary Gooch was once young and slender and carefree. But with each passing year she's accumulated an excess of pounds and worries. When, on the eve of her 25^th wedding anniversary, her handsome husband Jimmy does not come home, Mary wonders whether her size or her aversion to adventure chased him off. With few clues, Mary boards a plane for the first time in her life, venturing 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.

In THE WIFE'S TALE, Lori Lansens brings us another riveting outsider perspective in a powerful story of craving and fulfillment.

Editorial Reviews

Casey Cep

"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."
— New York Times Sunday Book Review

Deborah Donovan

"Lansens writes with acute insight into Mary's bingeing and depression, fully immersing readers in her protagonist's struggle to find a new and better self."
— Booklist

More Reviews (6) Fewer Reviews

Entertainment Weekly

"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."

Casey Cep

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.
—The New York Times

Publishers Weekly

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. In Leaford, Mary Gooch’s life is strictly circumscribed—she’s even worn a rut in the carpet between the bed and the kitchen, so often has the 302-pound woman made the trip. So when Mary’s handsome husband disappears on the eve of their silver wedding anniversary, Mary wonders whether her size or her aversion to adventure chased him off. With few clues, Mary leaves her small town for one of the first times in her life, venturing first to Toronto and then to the suburbs of Los Angeles, where a series of encounters with strangers shakes her out of her lethargy. Mary’s journey may be too carefully mapped out, but she’s 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. (Feb.)

Library Journal

Mary Gooch is beyond shock when her husband leaves the night before their silver anniversary party. Jimmy Gooch has always loved her, but with each new trauma—two early miscarriages, her father's death, even the loss of her feral cat—Mary has felt less worthy of his affection and more hungry. Now weighing 302 pounds, Mary can't seem to move past her malaise. Finding $25,000 in their bank account, Mary flies, for the first time, from their small Canadian town to her mother-in-law's home in Southern California, determined to wait for her prodigal spouse. While there, she loses her appetite but discovers a measure of self-worth through the "kindness of strangers." VERDICT Lansens's (The Girls) portrait of a woman who hides behind the Kenmore as protection from life's heartache is earthy and primal in its pain. Yet Lansens doesn't resort to an overnight makeover to save Mary. Instead, our heroine uncovers a hidden strength she had all along. Those who loved The Girls will be pleased that Lansens is back. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 10/15/09.]—Bette-Lee Fox, Library Journal

Kirkus Reviews

Searching for the husband who disappeared on the eve of their 25th wedding anniversary, an obese woman changes her life. The mystery in Lansens's follow-up to The Girls (2006) is not why long-suffering Gooch left but what took him so long. Four-hundred-pound Mary has pushed him away for years, distrusting and refusing every gesture of affection. She has been under the sway of what she calls "the obeast" since childhood; she and Gooch fell in love as seniors in high school, after a parasitic infection caused a sudden weight loss. A gifted writer, Gooch gave up his college dreams to marry Mary when she became pregnant. But she miscarried before the wedding, her weight returned, and it increased even more once she learned she could not have children. For years Gooch has tried to interest Mary in the larger world, or in himself, but her only passion has been food. He goes missing after depositing $25,000 from a scratch-and-win lottery game into their joint checking account. Devastated, she is finally galvanized to leave their small Ontario hometown to look for him. Serendipitous events follow. Restaurant receipts lead her to Toronto, where she finds Gooch's long-lost sister, who says he's headed to see his estranged mother in Golden Hills, Calif. On the curb outside LAX, a kindly limo driver picks up Mary and arranges a salon makeover before dropping her at her mother-in-law's house. Gooch isn't there, but while waiting for him in California Mary befriends a divorcee with triplets and a hunky Mexican-American gardener. She warms to Gooch's prickly mother, whose revelations force Mary to reexamine her marriage. Meanwhile, she loses her appetite. By the time she accepts that Gooch may notreturn, she is svelte and eating only for the right reasons. Readers will still be hungry: While Mary's evolution is all too predictable, Lansens never adequately explains the more enigmatic, sympathetic Gooch. Redemption Lite.

People

"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."

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780316069311
Publisher: Little, Brown & Company
Publication date: 2/10/2010
Pages: 353
Sales rank: 826,972
Product dimensions: 6.30 (w) x 9.30 (h) x 1.30 (d)

Meet the Author

Lori Lansens was born and raised in Chatham, Ontario, a small Canadian town with a remarkable history and a collection of eccentric characters, which became the setting for her first two bestselling novels. Living with her family in southern California now, she could not resist the pull of her fictitious 'Baldoon County' when she set out to write The Wife's Tale. She took the journey, along with her main character, from Canada to the Pacific Coast of America, where she enjoys the sunshine, and has learned a thing or two about transformation.

Read an Excerpt

A Pretty Face

Alone in the evenings, when the light had drained from the slate roof of her small rural home, and when her husband was working late, Mary Gooch would perform a striptease for the stars at the open bedroom window: shifting out of rumpled bottoms, slipping off blousy top, liberating breasts, peeling panties, her creamy flesh spilling forth until she was completely, exquisitely nude. In the darkness, she’d beg her lover the wind to ravish her until she needed to grasp the sill for support. Then, inhaling the night like a post-coital cigarette, Mary would turn to face the mirror, who’d been watching all along.

The mirror held the image Mary Gooch knew as herself, a forty-three-year-old brunette standing five and a half feet tall, so gilded with fat that hardly a bone from her skeleton could insinuate itself in her reflection. No hint of clavicle, no suggestion of scapula, no jag in her jaw, no scallop in her knee, no crest of ilium, no crook of knuckle, not a phalange in the smallest of her fingers. And no cords of muscle, either, as if she were enrobed by a subcutaneous duvet.

Mary remembered, when she was nine years old, stepping off the scale in Dr. Ruttle’s office and hearing him whisper the word to her slight mother, Irma. It was an unfamiliar word, but one she understood in the context of the fairy-tale world. Obeast. There were witches and warlocks. So must there be ogres and obeasts. Little big Mary wasn’t confused by the diagnosis. It made sense to her child’s mind that her body had become an outward manifestation of the starving animal in her gut.

Such a pretty face. That was what people always said. When she was a child they made the comment to her mother, with tsking pity or stern reproach, depending on their individual natures. As she grew, the pitying, reproving people made the comment directly to Mary. Such a pretty face. Implied was the disgrace of her voluminous body, the squander of her green eyes and bow lips, her aquiline nose and deep-cleft chin and her soft skin, like risen dough, with no worry lines to speak of, which was remarkable because, when she wasn’t eating, that’s what Mary Gooch did.

She worried about what she would eat and what she would not eat. When and where she would or wouldn’t. She worried because she had too much or not nearly enough. She worried about hypertension, type 2 diabetes, atherosclerosis, heart attack, stroke, osteoarthritis. The contempt of strangers. The mouths of babes. Sudden death. Protracted death. She worried all the more because all the worry made her sleepless, and in her dreamless hours hosted more worries, about her husband, Gooch, and the approach of their silver anniversary, about her menial job at Raymond Russell Drugstore and about her list, which she imagined not as Things to do but Things left undone.

Weight is only numbers on a scale, she told herself, and her mirror just another point of view. Squinting at her naked reflection when the moon was waxing and the angle just right, Mary Gooch saw beauty in the poetry of her contours, in the expressive, expansive, edible flesh, and understood why an artist sketching nudes might find appealing the mountainous gut, and favour the pocked shore of sloping thigh, and enjoy the depth and shadow of pendulous breasts and multiple chins. A shape ample and sensuous, like the huge round vase handed down on the Brody side of the family, in which she arranged her ditch lilies in the spring. Or like the dunes of virgin snow on the hills beyond her home outside small-town Leaford.

Mary wished to be a rebel against the tyranny of beauty but was instead a devotee, coveting its currency, devouring images in glossy magazines and broadcast TV, especially the kind that chronicled the lives of the rich and famous. She lingered over the body shots, outlining with her fingertips, like an appreciative lover, the rock-hard abdominals and concrete glutes, sinewy arms and pumped deltoids–so daring on a woman–coltish legs, wasp waist, swan’s neck, lion’s mane, cat’s eyes. She accepted the supremacy of beauty, and could not deny complicity in the waste of her own.

It was often an unbearable burden for Mary Gooch to carry both her significant weight and the responsibility for it, and she naturally sought to blame. The media was her target, just as it was another of her addictions. She would tear through the pages of her magazines, gratified by the celebrity cellulite, horrified by the gorgeous anorexics, noting the fall must-haves, sneering with the critics about fashion disasters, then realize she’d eaten a quart of premium ice cream, coerced by the advertisement beneath the picture of the TV cutie with poor taste in men. Mary knew it was all the media’s fault, but finger pointing was too much exercise, and she couldn’t sustain the blame for long. Especially since she was so often confronted by the stupid genius of just saying no.

Jimmy Gooch, Mary’s husband of nearly twenty-five years, read Time and Newsweek and Scientific American and The Atlantic and National Geographic. He watched CNN, even when America was not on red alert, and cable talk shows with clever panelists who laughed when nothing was funny. With Gooch working late most evenings, and busy playing golf on the weekends, Mary reckoned they were down to spending only a hand ful of waking hours a week together and wished to relieve the silence between them, but didn’t share Gooch’s passion for politics. The couple sometimes found common ground in musing on the vagaries of human nature. “Read the essay at the back,” Gooch had said recently, tapping her on the head with the rolled-up magazine– a gesture she charged was aggressive, but he argued, playful.

The article spoke of the ills of North American culture, the mistaking of acquisition for success, gluttony for fulfillment. Gooch clearly meant for Mary to draw a comparison to her gastronomical indulgence, and she did, but the piece was provocative in its own right, posing the question: Are people generally happier now, with instant access and quick fixes and thousands of channels and brands to choose from, than they were before the Industrial Revolution? Mary instantly decided no. In fact, she wondered if the opposite was true, that in the hardscrabble life of her pioneering ancestors, whose singularity of purpose was clear, there had been no time to ponder happiness. Chop wood. Carry water. It was impossible to imagine that the early Brodys, who’d cleared Leaford from the Burger King to the gas station, had ever endured a sleepless night.

Having read enough magazines, and having spent hours lurking in the self-help section, Mary Gooch knew that she wasn’t alone in her morbid obesity or her abstract malaise. Symptoms of despair were everywhere, and formulas for success within her grasp. A person could get a good night’s sleep and wake refreshed, shed unwanted pounds without dieting, make dinners for six in twenty minutes or less, rekindle sexual passion, and achieve five personal goals by the end of the month. A person could. But in spite of the step-by-step instructions, Mary could not. The secret remained classified. She appeared to be missing some key ingredient, something simple and elusive, like honesty.

Mary had been raised without religion but instinctively drew a separation between her spirit and body. Her spirit had no gravitational pull. Her body weighed three hundred and two of earth’s pounds–the two pounds significant because she’d once vowed that she’d kill herself if she got up beyond three hundred. Another promise broken. Further recrimination. The truth of what drove her hunger was as present and mysterious as anyone’s God.

Certainly grief fed the beast, and with her encroaching middle age came more and greater opportunities for it. Every passage, but particularly the corporeal kind, further embellished Mary Gooch. Thirty pounds for her mother, accumulated over many months, years ago, although Irma was not actually deceased. The babies, so long ago, had added fifteen and twenty pounds respectively. Then it was the ten when her father died in the spring. And another ten with Mr. Barkley in the summer. She felt vaguely charitable assigning the poundage to her loved ones, in the same way that she was mildly comforted by calculating her load in UK stones, in the British style, rather than North American pounds.

During her painful cycles of grief and gain, Mary thought it would be better to have any religion and lose it, than never to have one at all. She relied on dubious knowledge and remedial understanding to cobble together a system of beliefs that she was forever editing and amending, depending on the latest magazine article or persuasive celebrity endorsement. Except for the rule of three–an enduring belief, if unfounded by religious text. Terrible things happen in clusters of three. Death, serious accidents, financial ruin. One. Two. Three. What would end the trilogy after her father and Mr. Barkley, she wondered. Another death? Or just more deceptively endurable misfortune?

Hauling her corpulence the few steps from her truck in the parking lot to the back door of Raymond Russell Drugstore, starved for breath, heart valves flushing and fluppering, Mary would think, It’s me. I will end the trilogy. Here comes my fatal heart attack. Drowning in regret, she’d see everything clearly, the way reckless adults do, too late. But like all things, the feeling would pass, and she would click on another worry, each one dense and nuanced enough to sustain her interest, with intriguing links to distract her from the larger picture. The ticking of time. The machinations of denial.

Mary Gooch did not so much pray to God as wish to God, of whom she was sporadically unsure. She wished to God for an end to all wars. And that her manager would catch his scrotum in the cash register at work. She wished for her mother’s peaceful death. And that she had something nice to wear to her silver anniversary dinner party. And then there was the wish that preempted all other wishes, the one she wished hourly, eternally– that she could just lose the weight. This wish Mary would offer to her uncertain God in the smallest and most humble of voices. If I could just lose the weight, Gooch would love me again. Or sometimes it was, I could let Gooch love me again. The state of her body was inseparable from the state of her marriage, and the universe.

If I could just lose the weight.

For all her uncertainty about God, and in addition to the rule of three, Mary Gooch believed in miracles.

Reading Group Guide

1. Mary Brody struggles with what she calls her “obeast.” What is her obeast? Beyond the obvious “subcutaneous duvet” she carries, how else does that struggle manifest itself in her life?

2. At one point, Mary admits to hating when she’s described as having a “pretty face.” Why?

3. Why do you believe Jimmy Gooch (Gooch) left his wife? More importantly, why does Mary break from the inertia she’s lived with for so long to leave and look for Gooch?

4. When Mary complains to her father that she must be a pessimist because she always sees the glass half-empty, her father replies, “Forget about the glass, Murray. Get a drink from the hose and push on” (p. 27). In what ways, if any, does Mary heed his advice?

5. Mary often attributes her weight gain to grief and loss. If that’s the case, why does she start to lose weight after Gooch is gone? Is her transformation permanent? What might happen to Mary if Gooch returns?

6. While walking on the beach with Jesus, Mary finally articulates out loud what she has known in her heart for some time – Gooch is not coming back. At what point does Mary move from waiting for Gooch to having a life without him? Why was she never angry with him for leaving her?

7. At Frankie’s hairdressing salon, a woman comments on Mary’s admission that Gooch has left her, saying “I don’t care what happened. Twenty-five years is worth fighting for” (p. 174). Do you agree in principle? Do you agree in Mary’s case?

8. At the points in her journey where she needs it most, Mary always finds someone waiting to help: Big Avi, Frankie, Eden, Emery Carr, Ronnie Reeves, Jesus Garcia. What accounts for her good fortune? Is Mary experiencing the kindness of strangers because she’s “looking up” from the ground for the first time in years?

9. How do these benevolent gestures from strangers tap into the giving side of Mary’s nature?

10. Can you think of an instance in your own life when someone or something arrived just when you needed it most?

11. Mary has an interesting and redemptive relationship with her mother-in-law. What is it that they need from each other and how do they find it?

12. What was your reaction to the end of Mary’s story? What do you believe is next for her?

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The_Reading_Reviewer

Posted January 25, 2010

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I Also Recommend:

Don't forget the tissue because this book will have you shedding some happy tears!

When we travel the hills and valleys of our lives we face those times where we stand at a crossroads and the reality of past challenges butt up against future hopes and expectations. There are moments we decide to go one way or another and once the decision is made our lives are irreversibly altered. During some of these moments dreams can be shattered and hearts broken especially when the results of certain decisions are made for us by others we love and trust that it seems we did not know at all. But when the dust settles are we left heartbroken or maybe heart hopeful.

Mary Gooch is standing at that crossroads in her life when her husband on the eve of their 25 anniversary decides to park his delivery van after winning the lottery and leave her to go "find himself". Mary had been Jimmy Gooch's wife since she was 18 years old and has no idea who or what she is if not this person who lives in a small Canadian town going through the motions of day-to-day existence with him. Well that is not completely true because Mary also knows that she is an obese woman who has battled a hunger her entire life that only food could fulfill. Food was her friend when she was lonely, her ally in getting through stress and the one solace that made her feel like she had a purpose in her life. But when her husband disappears she has to move out of the comfort of her relationship with food and find a new way to satisfy the feeling of emptiness this situation has created. Mary questions whether she capable of doing anything alone but decides that regardless of her size, shape or fear of the unknown she has to find her husband regardless of where he has gone.

But when Mary goes in search of her husband and she gets on a plane for the first time in her life figuring out how to fit into the airplane seat is the least of her problems. Her overweight status causes her to battle fatigue, her gentle nature sets her up to be taken advantage of and her fear of change pushes her to a new starvation that even food cannot satisfy. Mary challenges herself to show that she is more than a number on a scale or a sheltered wife. She proves that she is a capable woman regardless of where Gooch may be hiding. Her mother-in-law once an enemy becomes an ally, strangers becomes friends and new situations become invigorating instead of overwhelming.

Mary may have lost her identity when her husband left and possibly her money when her purse goes missing but it turns out that neither of those things defined her and once she starts knocking on doors and tearing down walls she finds out that she is not that person on her passport. Sometimes you have to leave dreams behind to find a reality that is better than anything you thought of imagined.

What an amazing person Mary Gooch is regardless that she has a weight issue but because of it. She is indicative of every one of us as we all have some demon that chases us, some fear we pretend doesn't exist and issues we try to ignore. But when Mary looks in the mirror she doesn't see her full figure but instead she sees her beautiful, warm and glowing personality that has been hidden not behind the weight but behind her fear of showing the world how beautiful she really is. No one can teach you this or show you how to love yourself but once you do there is not stopping whatever goal you set for yourself - they are achievable simply by being yours.

Mary Gramlich ~ ("The Reading Reviewer") ~ www.marygramlic

5 out of 6 people found this review helpful.
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poosie

Posted March 6, 2010

I Also Recommend:

It's quite the roller coaster ride and worth every moment you spend reading it!

The protagonist in Lori's new novel, Mary Gooch, who is middle-aged, morbidly obese, and depressed, will tug at your heartstrings.

The reader is instantly swept into Mary's life and becomes concerned for her husband's whereabouts. It's their 25th anniversary and he hasn't come home. As she waits for him to come home she's thinking back over all the years before, during and after they were married. The adventure is about Mary's amazing trek to find her husband, and herself in the process. It's quite the roller-coaster ride and worth every moment you spend reading it!!

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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CymLowell

Posted February 23, 2010

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Review by www.cymlowell.blogspot.com

Imagine that you were left all alone one night. No spouse, no money, down on yourself, no children, no relatives active in your life, no future, and really no past except for the absent spouse. What would you do? Would you go down in flames? Or would you soar like a phoenix, reborn from the ashes of prior life?

This is the story of Mary Gooch, an obese rural Canadian woman who declared that she would commit suicide if she weighed more than 300 pounds. With that figure in the rearview mirror, she continued to gain. The day before her 25th wedding anniversary, her husband disappeared. He left a note saying he had won the lottery and left her some money in the bank.
Mary then embarked on the journey of her life.

The Wife's Tale is a beautiful story, compelling told to the point that Mary becomes our hero. I was excited to follow her evolution, cheering for her at every step in the path. I celebrated her achievements and self-realizations. When she encountered adversity, or defeat, I hoped she would brush herself off and move forward, which she inevitably did. This is a story of self-determination at its finest. We should all seek to find ourselves. Mary does in her own way.

I can only hope that I would be as strong as Mary.

In the end, this is a story of self-fulfillment. Each of us is the master of our own destiny, reaping the harvest of what we sow. Mary sowed affection, generosity, and faith in the strangers that she met. She was rewarded with a new life. Perhaps, she was far better off in her new life than had the prior life continued.

The Wife's Tale is also a spiritual guide. Though not a religious book as such, the life of Mary is a testament to the healing power of redemption. A new life born from the bold.

I loved this book and so will you!

3 out of 3 people found this review helpful.
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TheCrowdedLeaf

Posted January 8, 2010

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Honest and sad, yet funny and fresh.

It was a wonderful feeling to say that I knew from the second page of this book that it would be good. Not having read Lansen's earlier novel, The Girls, I now feel envious of those who have, since talent like hers as shown in The Wife's Tale makes me believe all her writing must be wonderful.

The Wife's Tale is a novel about Mary Gooch and her life. Her constant battle with food and her body, her ever-present hunger, her ghosts from the past reminding her of better times. Times when she was happy, and carefree, and skinny. It's about her secrets and her husband. Her husband of twenty-five years who she married when she was young and svelte and pregnant, before she gained the weight and lost the baby. Her husband who disappears the night before their anniversary, saying and doing nothing, just leaving. Leaving her with her secrets and hunger until the day she wakes and realizes she doesn't need food. She wakes from her life and chooses to take a step in a new direction, to embark on a journey. To become someone other than the woman who only wears dark navy scrubs, the woman from Leaford who is incredibly obese. To be the woman who solves her own problems. In the journey she takes to find her husband, she finds herself: the Mary without the food.

This story was heartbreaking and sad, but also incredibly beautiful and lyrical and literary and uplifting. Lansen weaves Mary's memories into the story which help us to understand her pain, weight issues are something to which most of us can relate. Brutally honest and blunt, occasionally fresh and funny, but always true and real from the perspective of an overweight women who feels helpless, this was a touching message of hope and the power of change and strength in us all.

I loved Mary Gooch. I loved her for being honest with me about who she was and the secrets she has. The chocolates, the binges, the tabloids, the obsession. And I loved her for making a choice, for leaving Leaford, for going after her husband, and then changing direction on the way. For following her father's old advice to "take a drink from the hose and push on."

5 stars

(I received this book from the Hachette Book Group)

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
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MRSREVDR

Posted April 8, 2010

Surprising!!!!Can't put it down.

This was a book hard to put down, the story and the plot, twisted and turned in ways that kept deepening the characters and my connection to them. It is great fiction and the message on how a person can reconnect to themselves and reclaim their identity is anything but fiction. So it is the best of both!!!!!

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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Heart2Heart

Posted April 1, 2010

more from this reviewer

What would you do if your husband didn't come home from work one night? What would you do?

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.

I had the wonderful opportunity to receive this book compliments of Hachette Book Groups to review. I was hooked from the turning of the first page. You live you life with Mary as she struggles to understand the complexity of what she has done to her life and how she is going to move forward. Not knowing if her husband, who she refers to as the Gooch, is going to come home, Mary has some tough decisions that she must begin to make one step at a time.

If you would like to know more about the book and where to purchase a copy, please click on the link below.

http://www.hachettebookgroup.com/books_9780316069311.htm

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
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jingobook

Posted March 25, 2010

Loved Mary Gooch In Wife's Tale

If anyone wants to read a beautifully written book on a womman's journey to self discovery, this is a book to read. It starts off with Mary Gooch who is a very unhappy and Isolating woman. Mary suffered from a weight problem most of her life and uses food for her source of comfort and to stuff her feelings of so many years of rejection. She has been married for 25 years to a man who on there 25th anniversary decides to up and leave with no clue to his whereabouts. In her desperate search to find him, she starts to explore all the good as well as the bad that the world has to offer outside her small town in Canada. In her journey without her even trying she starts to shed pounds,and starts to realize more about herself as she searches for her dissapearing husband. Reading the pages of this book I saw myself in so many ways. Her thoughts, her actions, and her desperate need to feel connected will inspire many.

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MamaLlamaCR

Posted March 21, 2010

I Also Recommend:

A wife who has let herself "go", filled with one disappointment after another, she becomes rather complacent with her life. Once her high school sweetheart husband decides he has had enough he leaves Mary. Surprisingly Mary finds inner s

Mary's life takes her from her small hometown to sunny California. Her very first time on a plane Mary braves her fear and soliders on. In the course of searching for Jimmy, her awall husband, Mary comes to care for her hostile mother-in-law. Along the way Mary meets many kind hearted strangers who are all part of helping Mary become the woman she has buried deep inside for so many years. One special person makes Mary feel like a woman once again and awakens her long dormant self. Lori Lansens touches on things that all woman would can to relate too. A wonderful read, that is very hard to put down.

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ChelseaW

Posted January 5, 2010

more from this reviewer

I Also Recommend:

A Comforting Read!

On the eve of their 25 year anniversary, Mary Gooch's husband leaves for work and never comes home. Weighing in at 302 pounds, she finds herself suddenly alone and clueless as to what to do next. The one thing she knows for sure is that she needs to find her husband and bring him home. And so she sets out with a few clues to find him. But what she finds instead is the little bit of herself that she was missing.

THE WIFE'S TALE is slightly slow to start, but once Mary has momentum, the book will carry you along with a will of it's own. It is uplifting to read about Mary's adventure and the extremely trusting and nice people she meets along the way. Lansens writes with flowing prose and soft tones that make for a very enjoyable read. I wanted Mary's story to continue for another 200 pages!

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Anonymous

Posted December 19, 2011

Aaaaahhh

Agree with previous reviews- we get it, she's fat snd an emotional eater. Author should have cut some of that out and actually wrote an ending. I was finally really into it and it just stopped. Aggravating!
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9988236

Posted September 22, 2011

Another great read by Lori Lansens!
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bkind2allKW

Posted March 19, 2011

You Won't be Sorry

Great book, interesting writing style and unusual dialog. Wish it was a little longer to more smoothly bring the story to its conclusion. Would read this author again.
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KER40

Posted March 16, 2011

more from this reviewer

Ending was a let down

I enjoyed the characters and finally started cheering for Mary and couldn't wait to read the outcome and then......It just ended. I was VERY upset with the ending.
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Anonymous

Posted May 5, 2010

Tired of the word "fat"

I purchased this in an audiobook format. The author spent endless CD's convincing me that the main character was fat. I got it - she was fat - she ate too much - she was not happy with herself or her life - I got it the by the first CD. I didn't need her to drone on about it CD after CD. Once she gave up on this tactic, I became enamored with the character's life. I thought, 'I hate that this is going to end soon' when all of a sudden - bam - it ended. I totally hated the ending, or rather lack of ending. I prefer for the author to either complete the story for me, or else lead me in a direction so I can complete it in my head. I don't want to be left hanging from a rope that long.
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Anonymous

Posted March 13, 2010

Good story, good character study, but left me wanting more

Mary Gooch is a lost soul who has reconciled herself to being morbidly obese. She withdraws from the world and her husband Gooch who, in flashbacks, seems to adore her. When Gooch just disappears on the eve of their anniversary Mary is forced to re-enter the world she has left behind.
In fact, she embarks on two journeys--one geographically outside her small Canadian town, and another that involves rediscovering herself.
Mary is a conflicted, troubled woman who ultimately reinvents herself inside and out. Gooch never reappears, and for me, that was the one flaw in an otherwise good story. I kept expecting him to show up at the end of the book, anxious to hear HIS story. He seemed like such a good guy. Could that be the basis for this author's next novel? Let's hope so.
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Anonymous

Posted February 21, 2010

I Also Recommend:

Raw to Read

This is a challenging book, so sad, I would never want to read it on a rainy day. I agree the ending is lacking, needs a follow up book, One can imagine her new life but the writing style ask for more from the author. Weight issues discussed are so clear, and the losses of a life lived are so great, I finished the book feeling empty, more than feeling positive about her future. I do not like the book cover as it does not represent the charachers physical apperance. It is not a book of escapism if you have any obesity/eating disorder issues. This is my first book by this author.

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Anonymous

Posted February 7, 2010

I Also Recommend:

A Good Fast Read

I loved this book but was disappointed with the ending. There should be another book to finish this story. Lori Lansens is a good writer and keeps you interested in the story. I am sure I will buy other books by her.
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litman

Posted September 9, 2009

a great book from a terrific writer...

Lori Lansens is one of my favorite authors (RUSH HOME ROAD, THE GIRLS). She writes stories about unique characters that you'll never forget. Her writing style is beautiful and her stories are surprising and compelling. Her latest book THE WIFE'S TALE is probably her best yet. It's still only available in Canada (a friend sent me a copy) but it's a gem worth waiting for!

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Anonymous

Posted August 6, 2010

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Anonymous

Posted May 7, 2012

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