New in Paperback: Wife 22 by Melanie Gideon

Last year, January Magazine contributing editor, Monica Stark, loved Melanie Gideon’s debut novel, Wife 22, out in “Reader’s Circle Editon” paperback this week from Ballantine. The Reader’s Circle Edition includes a conversation with the author and a reading group guide. When the book came out in hardcover last May, Stark wrote:

The homage to Joseph Heller in the title of Melanie Gideon’s debut novel is not an accident. “I think marriage is a sort of Catch 22,” Gideon said in a recent interview. “It’s strange how some of the little quirks and eccentricities of your mate that you found so charming in the beginning -- that may have even contributed to you falling in love with them -- 20 years later are the things that drive you absolutely crazy.”

Imagine Bridget Jones a couple of decades on and the “happily ever after” has turned into “another day of this?” and that will get you pretty close to the basic headspace in Wife 22.

As Stark pointed out, Gideon is the author of The Slippery Year: A Meditation on Happily After, so she knows this territory. Wife 22 is not high art, but it touches on the now of this moment. As PEOPLE suggested, “An LOL Instgram about love in a wired world.”

You can catch Stark’s review here. ◊