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Sep 07, 2010

Kirsten rated it:

This book fell far short of its promise. It is presented as the story of a woman finding out about her husband's infidelity after his early death, but it's really more about how she coped. And how she coped appeared to involve a lot of screaming profanities at people, and bouncing into bed with people she didn't much like. She comes off as profoundly unlikeable (which made me wonder why all these men were chasing her, frankly). Certain segments of the book definitely read like vengeance on h More...

1 comment like (11 people liked it)

Jan 08, 2010

Elixxir rated it:

As a married chick I have a morbid fascination with tales of adultery and betrayal and I'm clearly biased towards the wife. Good grief, how do you take a story so rife with drama and make it this painfully boring? I mentioned that to a friend and her comment was 'maybe that's why he cheated'. Yes, we're mean. But not necessarily wrong. Nothing to new to see, learn or experience here. Pass.

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Oct 20, 2011

Lavonne rated it:

Quite a compelling read, I could barely put this book down. Julie’s husband dies unexpectedly and then like a house of cards, her carefully constructed life falls apart, as she realizes her husband was unfaithful almost continuously throughout their marriage. Part of what kept me turning the pages was identifying with the pain she felt and the struggle to rebuild her life. Been there, done that.

I loved her brutal honesty, even when at times I was stunned by some of the things she inc More...

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Oct 09, 2011

Jen rated it:

This book feels a lot like nonfiction. The characters (Julie's friends) are well-developed and the plot twists (Julie's life) are incredible. I can't imagine the pain this woman went through, and am so amazed at her bravery -- how she confronted such a difficult situation head-on without apology. Some may think it was a risky move, writing such a book when you've got a young daughter who will learn all the ugliness of her parents' relationship. But I for one feel there's nothing wrong with truth More...

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Jun 07, 2011

Mary Ann rated it:

I seemed to gravitate towards memoirs lately, so I bought this one because it had an interesting premise: husband drops dead on the bathroom floor, and widow ends up discovering that he had multiple affairs during their marriage. Reading it was like peering into someone's life when they weren't looking. My reactions were that I really didn't like this guy and wondered why Julie couldn't see through him when she met him. I was surprised at her tenaciousness in trying to contact his former liaison More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 24, 2011

LindyLouMac rated it:

I have absolutely no idea why this book has so many good reviews, mind you it does seem to have lots of bad ones as well. Maybe if I had read them first I would not have bothered with this tedious, dull read.

I knew it was going to be a memoir about a young woman trying to put her life back together when her husband unexpectedly dies of a heart attack. I also knew that she was going to discover that he had been unfaithful to her, fair enough and very sad, but she carries out a campaign More...

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May 13, 2011

Claude rated it:

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Apr 27, 2011

Romancing the rated it:

Review by Stephanie

Blurb: Julie Metz had a seemingly perfect life -- an adoring husband, a happy, spirited daughter, a lovely old house in a quaint suburban town -- but it was all a lie.

Julie Metz's life changed forever on one ordinary January afternoon when her husband, Henry, collapsed on the kitchen floor and died in her arms. Suddenly, this mother of a six-year-old became the young widow in her bucolic small town. But that was only the beginning. Seven months after Henry' More...

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Feb 11, 2011

Stephanie rated it:

Blurb: Julie Metz had a seemingly perfect life -- an adoring husband, a happy, spirited daughter, a lovely old house in a quaint suburban town -- but it was all a lie.
Julie Metz's life changed forever on one ordinary January afternoon when her husband, Henry, collapsed on the kitchen floor and died in her arms. Suddenly, this mother of a six-year-old became the young widow in her bucolic small town. But that was only the beginning. Seven months after Henry's death, just when Julie thought More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jan 30, 2011

Meagen rated it:

I originally rated this book 3 stars, but then changed my rating to 4 because I enjoyed the first two parts so much. The first part of the book is about her coping with her husband's death, and as someone who took many classes on family systems and grief and actually wrote a term paper on the 5 stages of grief, I was really interested in seeing how her husband's sudden death had an impact on her perfect life. The second part of the book is Julie dealing with her husbands huge secret, and I was More...

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Oct 18, 2010

Bookworm rated it:

Julie thought she had the perfect life. She was married to the love of her life, Henry and had a beautiful 6 year old daughter, Liza. She had a nice job as a freelance graphic designer and was able to work from home.

Henry was spontaneous and extravagant. He enjoyed cooking gourmet meals, parties, and was a social butterfly. He traveled alot, at times being away from home for weeks at a time. He was in the process of writing a book on cuisine and would travel around the world for rese More...

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Jun 14, 2010

Kasia rated it:

This is an incredibly intense book, I read it in two sittings and cringed though half of it, while counting my blessings that I have been spared the fate that so many women seem to suffer though these days. Julie Metz poured her heart and soul into this memoir, I was incredibly impressed with her strength to open up and expose her pain and her healing, most of us want to curl up and disappear when something horrible happens, and not necessarily tell everyone. When her husband of sixteen years su More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 10, 2010

Engineous rated it:

I couldn't get past the first eleven pages. They are rank with a putrid, hypocritical morality and self-absorbed ignorance of everyone else.

Within the first few pages, Julie Metz manages to butcher the meaning of umami by talking about how it is (paraphrased) "the taste of protein, the caress of fat." No, it isn't. First, you are biologically incapable of tasting protein. Second, umami has been better translated as "nuttiness". The Japanese have never been an exce More...

5 comments like

Feb 08, 2010

MB rated it:

I started out really liking this book. She was a character I could identify with, for the first quarter or so of the book. I thought she was brave and honest, trying to find out the truth about her husband. But then I kept reading. She kept referring to herself as a feminist, and she was anything but. She couldn't do anything without a man telling her it was all right...her brother, her lover, a man she met over the phone through a dating site. I thought she was a shitty mother, bringing home pr More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

Jan 03, 2010

David rated it:

surprisingly boring for a book about finding out a few months after his sudden death in middle age that your husband had many affairs incl. a long-term one with a woman in the neighborhood who was the mom of the author's daughter's pal.

Author goes on a fact-finding mission, interviewing all the "other women" she can find as well as her husband's therapist, author of a book he'd been reading about evolutionary psychology perspective on human mating, etc. She ends up forgi More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Oct 03, 2009

Christi rated it:

This book sounded interesting to me: the memoir of a woman who discovers her husband has a secret life... after he drops dead on their kitchen floor. I wanted to learn about his secrets and kept turning the pages until Metz uncovered them for me. But after that, I didn't really feel like I cared enough about Metz to keep reading the predictable trajectory of her ultimate forgiveness and acceptance. Her husband seemed duplicitous but interesting, while Metz does not. If anything, she makes such a More...

1 comment like (10 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2009

Katie rated it:

Four stars means "I really liked it", which is kind of like saying I really liked being glued to the Internet for news when terrorists launched that weekend long attack on Mumbai. It's not so much that I liked it as that I was fascinated by it, held hostage by it, trying but unable to avert my gaze. Perfection starts off almost immediately with the sudden death of the author's 44 year old husband, and if you begin the book knowing, as I did, the premise of her story you sit back and More...

1 comment like (4 people liked it)

Sep 27, 2009

s rated it:

let me preface this review by saying--julie metz is a good writer with creative metaphors and descriptions. in fact--i would say my favorite part about the book was the way she described how things looked or felt or smelled or tasted. and, i appreciated her honesty and candor about a troubling subject--the death of her husband and her complete ignorance of his constant infidelities, the details of which she unearthed after his sudden demise.

however...i had several problems with the b More...

4 comments like (6 people liked it)

Sep 18, 2009

Lee rated it:

Memoir; author's husband dies, she discovers he's had affairs with several women, she seeks to "understand why" by discussing with most of these women their relationship with her husband. I almost gave up reading this in the first part of the book because these people come across so incredibly unsympathetically. They both appear to be unkind, self-centered, conceited, privileged, and superficial. She is very high strung, always breaking out into tears and screaming rages about somethin More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Sep 09, 2009

Alison rated it:

I had to give up after 100 pages because time is precious. I found this book to be utterly annoying, with false notes on every page. Supposedly she is writing about a great betrayal, but within weeks of her husband's death she's having an affair with a family friend. In bed, post-coitus, this family friend tells her that her husband was unfaithful. She becomes livid with rage but then it turns out that she basically knew that he was being unfaithful, having gone so far as to ask, "Are y More...

0 comments like (6 people liked it)

Aug 24, 2009

Deirdre rated it:

Metz has produced a raw and moving memoir of her life as a grieving widow faced with the reality of her dead husband's infdelity. Her writing is honest and brave as she chronicles the unraveling of her marriage post her husband's death - as evidence of each new woman comes to light, Metz acknowledges that there were signs along the way, signs she either misread or simply ignored.

She approached her 'recovery' with zeal, contacting all of her husband's lovers, researching the sociology More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 23, 2009

Adele rated it:

This was a bit of a head-scratcher for me. It’s the memoir of a woman who, after her husband suddenly died, learned that he’d been having multiple affairs, including one with a family friend. She sets about trying to understand him, by contacting each woman, personally and/or by e-mail, and by doing research about men who lead this kind of life. This seemed a kind of overthinking—couldn’t it be that he was just a garden-variety jerk and she naïve? Aspects of her story made me want to scream: More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Aug 05, 2009

Heather rated it:

Whew. This was a real heart-wrenching reading experience for me. As a married woman, I never want to think that the life I'm living - or the man I'm married to - is anything other than what I know it to be. But within the story of this memoir, I saw that what you might know to be the truth isn't necessarily so.

This is a memoir of a woman who learns after her husband's premature death that he had been involved in numerous extramarital affairs, one of which was with a so-called " More...

1 comment like (1 person liked it)

Jul 20, 2009

Cabaret25 rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

1 comment like

Jul 07, 2009

Nancy rated it:

Geez Louise. When I read the blurb of this book (it's a memoir of a woman who, after her husband's sudden death, discovers that he was a serial cheater), I thought, "Huh. She has a six year old daughter, who will one day read this book. Not very nice for little Liza. Odd choice for Mommy to make." But it was on sale, 20% off, and it exercised a horrid fascination for me, so I bought it. And read it.

In this book, Julie Metz logs, in great detail: her fights with her h More...

3 comments like (10 people liked it)

Jun 21, 2009

Catherine rated it:

The book begins when Metz's husband of over a decade, Henry, collapses in their kitchen and dies. Metz reflects on her less than perfect marriage, which becomes even more complicated when seven months after Henry's death she finds out about his numerous affairs.

Metz includes segments from emails with sexually intimate details of her husband's affairs and also discusses her own sexuality, which might be too much information for some readers.

Metz was in her mid-forties w More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Jun 20, 2009

Diane rated it:

Perfection: A Memoir of Betrayal and Renewal , by Julie Metz is an extremely personal account of a not so "perfect" life. After the unexpected death of her husband Henry, and 12 years of marriage, 44 year old Julie Metz finds herself alone with a six year old daughter to raise. She spent the greater part of the next seven months living in a fog and missing the love of her life terribly. When a friend tells her about a woman Henry had been seeing in New York, Julie is shocked. Before lo More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Jun 12, 2009

Jesse rated it:

January 8, 2003. A pleasant house with a river view in a charming town not far from New York City. Julie Metz, a freelance graphic designer, is working on a book cover in her home office. Her husband Henry, a writer, is resting upstairs. Their six-and-a-half-year-old daughter Liza is in school.

And then death enters --- Henry's felled by a pulmonary embolism. He was just 44, the same age as his widow. They had been married for 13 years.

Happily married? Well, they entertai More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

May 11, 2009

Terri rated it:

Description:
Julie Metz's life changes forever on one ordinary January afternoon when her husband, Henry, collapses on the kitchen floor and dies in her arms. Suddenly, this mother of a six-year-old is the young widow in a bucolic small town. And this is only the beginning. Seven months after Henry's death, just when Julie thinks she is emerging from the worst of it, comes the rest of it: She discovers that what had appeared to be the reality of her marriage was but a half-truth. Henry had More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Aug 25, 2009

Rachel rated it:

Metz, who zealously tracks down each one of her husband's extramarital lovers after his sudden death, is an oddly unsympathetic character in her own memoir. While you feel like finding out that your husband was unfaithful throughout your entire 16 year marriage is upsetting and perhaps his choices of women (the seemingly longest relationship was with a neighborhood woman he frequently derided and who was the mother of their daughter's closest friend) were distressing, as she talks about her mar More...

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