You Can Be Right (or You Can Be Married)

July 2, 2012
Journalist, novelist (The Every Boy), and filmmaker Shapiro admits he’s neither a husband or a therapist. But he crisscrossed America interviewing (sometimes for 20 minutes, sometimes for several days) hundreds of divorced men and women about their war stories of romance, compatibility, and compromise, infidelity, and the intimate, explicit details of their sex lives. After finding a couple of pairs of lacy panties that weren’t hers, “Ann” snooped into her actor husband’s computers, seeing his passionate e-mails to a younger woman and photos of them in bed, and when she confronted him, he eventually confessed to affairs with 40 women. “Paul,” a psychologist who likes to dress as a woman and have sex with men, describes how he left his first wife so he could be free to be himself and told his current wife everything about his sexuality before getting married. While this book makes some perceptive points about relationships that will particularly resonate with readers going through the throes of a bad breakup, the interviews are often more confessional than insightful and veer from being frank and open to coarse and distasteful. Agent: Daniel Greenberg, Levine Greenberg Literary Agency.