Vow

November 5, 2012
A painfully told autopsy of her chronic unfaithfulness throughout her 18-year marriage becomes in the hands of freelance journalist Plump an excruciating exercise in self-realization. The discovery in 2005 that her husband, Bill, a corporate financial manager, had a mistress and small child living one mile from their home in Brandywine, Pa., moved Plump's already shaky marriage "into a new circle of deceit." Married in 1987, Plump had, early on and before the birth of her two sons, fallen into a pattern of infidelity with three other men, even revealing at one point her transgression to her husband. The marriage remained intact even after subsequent affairs by Bill ("He had an affinity for strippers"), culminating in Bill's 10-year relationship with Susan and out-of-wedlock child whom he managed to keep secret for a long time. Plump gradually reveals the degree of self-deception the two married people practiced over many years, as mismatched needs and gnawing mistrust fed their mutual appetite for risk, sex, and guilt. "What I wanted most, what drove me in every affair I had," she writes, "was the drug and energy of passion, of new intimacy." Plump manages in this frank memoir to fully capture her lifeâand woman, wife, and motherâwho leaves nothing unexamined and has nothing left to lose.

December 1, 2012
A woman's account of discovering her husband of 18 years had a second family and her confessions of her own affairs. Freelance reporter Plump opens her book with an epigraph by W.H. Auden: "Hunger allows no choice." She then goes on to describe the terrible choices she and her husband, Bill, made for the duration of their union. In 2005, a close friend of Plump's disclosed to her that Bill had another house nearby, and he often stayed there with a girlfriend Plump didn't know existed. The most gutting news was that Bill and his mistress, Susan, shared an 8-month-old baby. When confronted, Bill offered confirmation but no explanation. Partly for the sake of their two sons, the author tried to save her marriage despite Bill's repeated lies about having ended his affair. As Bill, who traveled frequently for business, evaded his wife, Plump pieced together the timeline of his infidelity (it started 10 years earlier) and communicated with Susan. She writes candidly about her own indiscretions, recounting details about each of her three affairs. She began cheating on Bill during their first year of marriage. "Romanticizing adultery seems an unfair thing to do," she writes, "but the truth is that it can be transformational on every level." She finally separated from Bill after his duplicity became unbearable. In the final third of the book, the author examines the differences between having an affair and being the victim of adultery. Readers may vacillate between finding Plump's behavior indefensible and feeling sympathetic toward her. Voyeuristic and base but surprisingly engaging.

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