Hiking trips offer little reading time, but this is a good travel book because it’s fast, relatively short, funny, scathing, psychological, and somewhat mysterious. 

It spans a 40+ year marriage between the narrator, Joan (the wife), and her writer husband, Joe,  who’s successful and arrogant and lusty. When they met, he was a married Smith college prof, and she was a doe eyed freshman–the cliche hookup that ends his marriage. 

When the book opens, they are in their 60s and on a plane to Helsinki where he will be awarded the Helsinki prize for literature. Mid flight, she decides she will divorce him when they return home. The narrative then shifts back and forth in time from their early marriage to the present to various points of their life and back to the present, all the while exposing and unraveling her anger, frustration, acceptance, forgiveness, disgust. She’s introspective and honest about her own role in putting up with him and what she gained—and also what she lost.

Joan is the narrator, so we get all of her emotions and her hilarious descriptions, especially of other women. For example, “She was a woman named Liana Thorne, who looked like one of those stick-insects that can change color at any given moment, so as to be entirely unnoticeable.”  

This is the scathing, hilarious voice that runs through the book, and it’s not only well-executed but quite entertaining. 

My only critique is that the plot twist/mystery was apparent to me early on, so I knew the outcome, but I still enjoyed watching how it unfolded. 

It was made into a 2017 movie in which Glen Close won several awards, but I’m not interested in seeing it bc I don’t care for the changes made to the original story. 4⭐️