Literary Wives Book Club (June 2026): Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:

• Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
• Naomi of Consumed by Ink
• Rebecca of Bookish Beck
• Kay of What Me Read
• Marianne of Let's Read

Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

I have to begin this review by admitting that I am not usually a short story reader. I have always gravitated towards novels, I think I just tend to prefer to spend a bit more time inside one story. It gives me more of an escape from the day-to-day and a place to still my otherwise very busy mind.  That's the good thing about this book club, though - it consistently pushes me outside my usual reading habits. 

Before I get into what Interpreter of Maladies says about wives I thought I would start I would start with some reflections on the collection as a whole. The collection centres largely on Bengali and Indian characters who are often living between cultures, and it explores the relationships between characters who usually share a marriage or a family, but seem unable to truly communicate with one another. Even though some of the stories are quite short Lahiri is still able to portray marriages, family histories, disappointments, migrations, betrayals, and entire emotional lives so acutely and pignantly it's not wonder that the collection won the Pulitzer Prize. 

The story that has stayed with me most is probably A Temporary Matter. Shoba and Shukumar are a married couple whose relationship has been devastated by the stillbirth of their baby. During a series of planned evening blackouts, they begin telling one another secrets in the dark. At first it feels as though the confessions might bring them closer together, but it becomes clear that the grief they have felt has irreparably kept them apart from each other and they are reflecting on what has been at it's end. It is a heartbreaking story, and one that felt particularly relevant to the Literary Wives theme because it asks whether love alone is enough when two people are grieving differently.

Another story that seems directly connected to the idea of wives is Interpreter of Maladies itself. Mrs Das initially appears to be a modern and confident wife travelling through India with her husband and children. Yet as the story unfolds we learn how dissatisfied Mrs Das is with her life. She confesses of her infedility to their tour driver, not so much for advice but jstu to connect with someone. Eventhough she is surrounded by her family on a wonderful holiday, she is desperately lonely. 

Loneliness is something that recurs throughout the collection. In The Blessed House, newlyweds clash over a series of Christian objects discovered in their new home. It's funny but it's also two people who have entered marriage without really knowing or understanding each other. Sanjeev spends much of the story frustrated by his wife and also fascinated by her. Rather than them having come to know each other and embarking on their life with each other in a partnership, they are still getting to know each other, a risky way to start a marriage perhaps. 

Overall, Lahiri rarely presents marriage as a place of certainty or fulfilment.  Her married characters often seem to be negotiating misunderstandings, disappointments, cultural expectations, private regrets. Essentially I think Intepreter of Maladies is trying to portray to the difficulty of truly knowing another person, a common theme in the books we have read for the Literary Wives Book Club. 

So what does Interpreter of Maladies say about wives or about the experience of being a wife?

For me, the strongest theme was invisibility. Often the wives appear to be carrying emotional burdens that their husbands either cannot see or do not fully understand. Some are lonely. Some are homesick. Some are disappointed by the reality of their lives. Some are living with secrets. Some are trapped in their grief. Yet very few feel able to express those feelings openly within their marriages. The couples rarely communicate honestly with each other. It's fascinating to see so many people who have committed to sharing their lives with one another, many of whom would have done so from a place of deep love, and yet they are so far apart from each other. 

For someone who does not usually read short story collections, I found this surprisingly rewarding. Not every story resonated equally with me, but by the end, I understood why Lahiri's work is so highly regarded. She had an extraordinary ability to capture entire relationships in just a handful of pages per story. 

Literary Wives (March 2026): Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:

• Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
• Naomi of Consumed by Ink
• Rebecca of Bookish Beck
• Kay of What Me Read
• Marianne of Let's Read

Mrs Bridge by Evan S. Connell

Mrs Bridge is set in middle-class Kansas City in the years between the late 1920s and the post-war period, and quietly follows the life of India Bridge, a respectable, well-off wife and mother living exactly the life she is supposed to want. 

The story unfolds through a series of small, precise vignettes which show moments in India Bridge’s life that, when taken together, give you an almost perfect sense of her character and her world. We meet her in her late teens and then follow her through her children’s younger years, their adolescence, and later, as they leave home and begin lives of their own. 

She lives a lonely life, with a husband who works almost constantly, and within social expectations that quietly but firmly shape everything she does. She couldn’t necessarily articulate that sense of restraint, but she clearly feels disconnected from herself and from her own life. Early on, she reflects that as a young woman she had felt marriage and family life might not be for her but she wasn’t taken seriously. That life simply wasn’t presented as a real option. Women (and men, to a lesser extent) were given one narrow path: marriage, children and domesticity. Mrs Bridge falls into what is expected of her, and from there she keeps rolling forward, never quite feeling like she is steering. She is always the passenger, never the driver. This idea is beautifully and painfully captured in the final scene of the book. 

I felt a little disconnected from her as a character but I think Connell does this deliberately. We feel removed from India because she is removed from herself. There are moments when she comes close to recognising what is missing and trying to do something about it, like when she leaves a potentially controversial book lying around, hoping it might start a conversation with her husband. But she always retreats. It is as though she is too afraid to follow these flickers of awareness through, too frightened to really confront the emptiness she senses in her life. 

There are a couple of possible reasons for this. She may be afraid of what she will discover if she looks too closely. Or she may simply never have been given the emotional language or life skills to identify and act on her own needs. This is a time when women were barely acknowledged as having needs at all, let alone encouraged to take them seriously. 

One of the most unsettling moments in the novel is her strangely muted response to a friend being killed by their own child. It feels as though she is frightened of strong feeling itself. Possibly she knows that if she faces the horror and pain she not be able to contain herself.  

There is also an undercurrent of casual, unquestioned racism running through the novel that feels entirely of its time. It appears in off-hand remarks, in social assumptions, and in the way people who sit outside Mrs Bridge’s world of comfort and respectability barely register as fully realised lives.  The prejudice is not loud or dramatic; it is simply absorbed into the background of everyday life. In a way, this mirrors Mrs Bridge’s own emotional blindness. Just as she rarely interrogates the limits placed on her as a woman, she also never questions the social order that places her so securely in it and others so far outside it. 

So much of what Mrs Bridge does, she does because she thinks she should. Hosting cocktail parties. Hiring a maid. Keeping special hand towels for special occasions that she hopes no one will use and no one ever does. These rituals of correctness become substitutes for meaning. They are how she measures whether she is succeeding at her life. 

Her relationships with her children are shaped in exactly the same way. She is deeply invested in what they should be doing, what they should care about, and how they should behave. She is so focused on the “shoulds” that she misses the quiet, ordinary pleasure of discovering who her children actually are and of building relationships with them that are genuinely mutual. 

What does Mrs Bridge say about being a wife?

What Mrs Bridge ultimately says about wives, and about women like Mrs Bridge, is so beautifully restrained. It shows how a life can be carefully constructed, socially admired, and still feel profoundly uninhabited or empty. Marriage does not ruin Mrs Bridge and Mr Bridge isn't cruel to her or her children. Mrs Bridge shows something something more insidious: a world that trains women to be accommodating, pleasant and grateful, while preventing them from coming to know themselves and be themselves.

This is a wonderful novel. It is short yet perfectly crafted. I really can’t fault it and I would recommend it to everyone.

Literary Wives Book Club (Sept 2025): Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:

• Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
• Naomi of Consumed by Ink
• Rebecca of Bookish Beck
• Kay of What Me Read

Novel About My Wife by Emily Perkins

Last book club we reviewed The Constant Wife by W Somerset Maugham (read my review here). When I finished The Constant Wife I appreciated its take on marriage and the power dynamics within. In contrast, Novel About My Wife fell a little flat for me. 

The central wife in Novel About My Wife is Ann. But in truth, the story is told entirely from Tom’s point of view (her husband) and feels like it speaks more about him than her. The title promises a novel about a wife, but what we really get is a husband narrating a sotry about his wife to the reader, ostensibly to keep her memory her alive but he may have other motives. Tom tells us that Ann is an Australia he met while she was living in London. He doesn't know much about her past or even why she is living in London. But he falls in love and marries her. They buy a house and when the story begins they are expecting their first child. 

At the beginning of the narrative, Ann is caught in an underground train derailment which undoutedly impacts her mental health. She descends into anxiety, believing that she is being followed by a stalker and sometimes obsessively cleaning their home. It eventually seems likely that her issues began before the train accident, but it is never certain. We see her only through Tom’s eyes and his interpretation of her behaviour. Can we even be certain that he is being honest with us?  ,  The novel never gives her a voice and we can only speculate and infer from what Tim recounts. There is a traumatic event hinted at in her past, that potentially is a defining even in her life that may or may not being related to the decline in her mental health. Is the stalker a delusion created by her mental health struggles or are the mental health struggles the delusion and the stalker real and somehow connected to her past? We know that Ann passes away (not a spoiler) and it's implied, butonly implied, that she died by suicide. The traumatic event that defines her is never explained. 

In short - I did not enjoy this book. 

To delve into this more deeply - I found the ambiguity frustrating. I wanted to understand what was going on with Ann. I wanted to know what had happened to her in the past that cast such a shadow. I wanted to know how she died and whether there might have been anything suspicious about it. 

Perhaps I could have exercised my little grey cells and drawn my own conclusions, but I never got that spark. The gaps felt empty and the book didn’t inspire me to search for answers, only frustrated that I didn't have any. Is the fact that the story is narrated by a husband about his wife's death and yet he has called it a "novel" some clue to my confusion? If anyone else who has read this has their own theories, please let me know. 

So what does this novel say about wives?

Honestly, for a novel called Novel About My Wife, I think tha tthis story says something more about Tom, the husband. If I had to say something, I was would say that the novel suggests that a wife can still be unknown to the person thought to love them more than most others. Ann is only defined by Tom's observations and projections. Tom himself admits to not knowing much about her past, but he also has little curiosity, even though the very fact of her being less than forth coming suggests something important and hidden. He takes her at face value, but is also dismissive of her. He might say that he loves her, but does he know her? Can you love someone that you don't know?

In the end, I'm not really sure what it says about the experience of being a wife and I have no love of the story. It felt more like an ambiguous retelling (potentially even a confession, but of what I'm not sure) of events from a husband who never really cared to understand his wife. Maybe there's something there - that people see you as a wife or partner, but rarely as yourself without that context. 

If your idea of a satisfying read involves clarity, emotion and a satisfying plot then this book is not for you. 

Literary Wives: The Constant Wife by W. Somerset Maugham

Literary Wives is an on-line book group that examines the meaning and role of wife in different books. Every other month, we post and discuss a book with this question in mind: 

What does this book say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

Don’t forget to check out the other members of Literary Wives to see what they have to say about the book!

Other participants:

• Kate of booksaremyfavouriteandbest
• Naomi of Consumed by Ink
• Rebecca of Bookish Beck
• Kay of What Me Read

This is my very first foray into the Literary Wives Book Club and I feel very lucky to be able to participate. It's been such a long time since I had the opportunity to talk books with others. This is definitely one of the great things about the internet. 

The Constant Wife by W Somerset Maughan

Maughan's The Constant Wife is the first play that I have read for some time. Written in the 1920s, it was considered very subversive in its depiction of marriage and gender roles. The play centres on Constance Middleton. Constance appears to be a lucky wife who lives a charmed life married to a successful doctor. What the audience soon learns is that her husband is having an affair with her best friend. When the news is eventually broken to Constance, she admits to knowing it all along. She doesn't feign heartbreak and instead, once the news is out in the open, Constance decides that the time has come to reclaim her independence by pursuing a career and her right to romantic and sexual autonomy. 

What does The Constant Wife say about wives or about the experience of being a wife? 

What sticks with me the most from reading The Constant Wife is the double standards in the standard by which men and women were held. Constance's husband, John, is excused for his infidelity. His infidelity is put down to an inherent weakness of males, who simply can't help themselves (poor things) and it's therefore considered excusable, particularly seen in Constance's mother's attitude toward his affair. This attitude absolves him of responsibility because he is simply a man who is a slave to his impulses. As a woman born into today, I almost don't blame them for taking this attitude. In truth, to me as a woman born into today, it feels like necessary mental gymnastics that women needed to enter into to cope with their lack of power within marriage and broader society. 

The double standards were even clearer considering how Constance was expected to react in response to discovering her husband's affair. Again, Constance's mother provides the perfect example of this. She expects Constance to maintain appearances to others and to preserve her relationship despite her husband's disrespect and betrayal. 

This is the experience of being a wife in the 1920s (and no doubt at other times) - men's affairs are tolerated - women must be forgiving, whether they feel that way or not. Most people, whether wilfully or otherwise, didn't see this as a double standard, but Maugham through Constance, calls society out. 

Double standards were then on show when John discovers that Constance may be about to embark upon an affair. Given his infidelity and her economic independence, Constance doesn't feel the need to hide this from him. His reaction, however, is to respond to her announcement with anger and control. He talks of 'not letting her' do such a thing and declares that she is doing him the greatest of injury. Although Constance reminds him that he conducted an affair with her best friend, he brushes it aside as not the same thing and demands to know whether this is instead her payback. 

This relates to something that I found a little striking in how their relationship is portrayed and that's in the way that Constance and John both in a way are faking their relationship in some way. How they came to be together is touched on in such a light way. It's almost presented as if Constance had numerous romantic options as a young lady, and John was the one the gentleman who seemed best. So, she chose him, and called it love, and carried on with her life until the events of the play unfold. John, while having an affair, pretends to be the perfect doting husband. Constance pretends to be the perfect wife, going so far as to hide her knowledge of the affair for some time. Constance's experience of being a wife exists almost on the surface, and when that surface becomes disturbed, she is forced to deal with something more important and integral - her experience of being herself and what it means to value herself as an independent person. John 

How does she do this? Shock - horror. She seeks employment by becoming an interior designer. That's right, she seeks not just emotional independence from her husband but financial independence as well. For a very long the experience of being a wife meant being financially dependent upon her husband. We know that many women find themselves still unable to escape dangerous relationships for this very reason. Constance claims her financial dependence and to demonstrate her freedom, Constance transfers money into John's bank account for her board and lodging. John clearly feels emasculated but Constance stands her ground, insisting on paying for her room and board so that "I could tell you, with calm and courtesy, but with determination, to go to hell."

Nonetheless, although Constance claims her economic independence which would have been very progressive for the time, it is still within the bounds of the gendered society within which they lived. Constance feels the need to pay board and lodging to her husband, despite it being their family home. Her contribution as mother and home maker is not sufficiently recognised to suggest that she may have some ownership of their shared home. John still spoke of allowing Constance to work - "Anyhow, you wanted to work and I yielded". When Constance talks about potentially commencing an affair of her how, John speaks of 'not allowing her'. I suspect the reality is that given his position as a male in 1920s society, he most likely could have prevented her if he so chose.

In the end, The Constant Wife reveals that being a wife (at least in the world of the 1920s) meant living within carefully scripted gender roles that almost meant sacrificing your own self to preserve appearance. Through Constance, Maugham exposes the unspoken truth of marriage and the double standards that can exist in marriages as a result of gender toles. Constance shows the strength it takes to speak those truths and step outside the bounds of what society allows for her gender. I think what I am trying to say is that being a wife is a role in marriage, but it is also a role within society. Constance’s ultimate choice is to value herself beyond that role and to be true to to herself.