Book of the Week: Heart of the Matter

Infidelty seems to be a theme of many of Emily Giffin's novels and Heart of the Matter is no different, however, I think the book can be best characterized as a portrait of a marriage. Stay-at-home mom Tessa struggles with wanting to be there for her young family and her choice to give up a career she loves to facilitate that. The book opens with Tessa and her husband Nick, a handsome and very successful pediatric plastic surgeon, celebrating their wedding anniversary. Before dinner is through Nick's called back to the hospital for an emergency. He forgot to switch his on-call shift. Tessa would recall it as the night everything changed.

But was it? Perhaps the trouble had started much earlier. While quite predictable the book does attempt to delve into the different reasons why marriages falter, why couples fall apart. Tessa struggles with not being the perfect wife and mother, even with more time on her hands, and has to contend with her own mother's dire warnings still ringing in her ears--that soon her husband will get bored of her, that by abandoning her career Tessa will no longer be the woman that Nick fell in love with.

Without giving away too much of the plot (not that it's exactly filled with mystery) Tessa soon finds herself in the exact place her mother warned her about. Alternating Tessa's point of view with that of Valerie Anderson, an often disappointed single mother and lawyer struggling to do right by her son Charlie, Giffin presents a story of "good people caught in untenable circumstances."

Some of the questions this book raises are interesting, like how different people react to a cheating spouse and the different reasons that relationships reach that point, and what happens when good people do bad things (another Giffin staple). When I read or hear stories like this I often wonder what I would do, always coming to the same conclusion. I don't know what I would do...no way to know, I figure, until you've walked that particular path.

Heart of the Matter wasn't a bad book, but it felt like there was something missing, something preventing me from getting lost in the story. It all seemed a bit too pat, too formulaic and didn't have me engrossed like some of Giffin's earlier works such as Something Borrowed (I will admit I'm looking forward to that movie, although I'm not sure how I feel about Hilary Swank as Rachel, and I was happy to see cameos by Dex and Rachel in Heart of the Matter). Despite all this I will say that Giffin does chick lit quite well and always leaves me with something to think about when I've read the last word.

Have you read Heart of the Matter or one of the other Emily Giffin books? What did you think?