Why You'll Love This
Two strangers whose spouses are sleeping together start writing letters to each other — and that's when it gets complicated.
- Great if you want: an intimate epistolary story about betrayal and unexpected connection
- The experience: quick and emotionally piercing — reads in one sitting
- The writing: Reid lets letters do all the work — restraint reveals more than exposition ever could
- Skip if: 88 pages feels too brief for the emotional investment you want
About This Book
Two strangers bound by the same betrayal. When Carrie Allsop writes a letter to a man she has never met—her husband's lover's husband—she sets something irreversible in motion. What unfolds between them is raw, tender, and completely unplanned: two people sifting through the wreckage of broken marriages, trying to make sense of how love can hollow itself out without warning. Taylor Jenkins Reid strips the infidelity story down to its most human elements, asking not just what happened but what we do with the truth once we finally have it.
The format is everything here. Told entirely through letters—between Carrie and David, and between the adulterous spouses themselves—the story builds its tension through what is said, what is withheld, and how voices shift over time on the page. Reid's prose is lean and emotionally precise, doing enormous work in a slim eighty-eight pages. The epistolary structure rewards close reading; each letter recontextualizes the last. It's a quiet, controlled piece of storytelling that demonstrates how much a writer can accomplish when she trusts the architecture of a form completely.
