I finished reading "The Mermaid Chair" by Sue Monk Kidd today. I'm a big reader, and I hit the library book sale each year where you can get a box of books for 5 bucks. I picked it up thinking it would be a fantasy novel, mermaids and such. I was wrong.

The book started out interesting enough, with the female protagonist called back to her childhood home due to her mother's apparent psychotic break. What ensued was the foggiest piece of literary (and I use that term loosely) fluff that I've ever read. She leaves her husband, not because they had grown apart, but they had grown too close together. Huh? Seriously, some of the reasons she gave for her dissatisfaction - he breathes too loud? What? She ends up having an affair with - get this - a MONK. Yep. You heard me. A monk. After meeting him she decides they are "soulmates" and throughout the summer - when she was supposedly there to care for her mother - she's having daily rendezvous with hunky monk-y at his love shack in the middle of some marsh somewhere.

I had stopped reading it when their affair started, it made me feel sick to read her selfishness and justifications...it hit close to home, I suppose. I had zero sympathy for her character or the supposedly spiritually tormented hunky monk-y. Her poor BH was only a fringe character in the book.

For some reason I finally decided to finish the book. Perhaps I was hoping to see her character's redemption, but I was disappointed. The affair ended, and she suddenly decided she missed her BH and returned home in the middle of the night. After she spent the night in the guest room (her BH refusing to speak to her or take back his wedding ring she'd so thoughtfully brought back), she wakes in the morning to him fixing her breakfast, and all is suddenly magically forgiven. I actually laughed out loud when I read that, I mean, wow, that was easy, right??? No consequences, and no apparent knowledge gained on her part, as she talked about ther "new" marriage and her fiercely prized separateness. No remorse. Even in her farewell conversation with hunky monk-y, she says something like she "needed to fall in love with " him. She even returns to said childhood home - where hunky monk-y's monastery is located, the next year (telling her BH she had to see her mother...yeah, right). And BH lets her go, after asking, "Are you going to see him?".

Nobody writes books that tell the truth about adultery. They write this fluff that seems to encourage the disastrous "follow your heart" philosophy. It just bothered me, and made me angry. Forgiveness is not so easy to come by. As a FWW who would have walked on broken glass to gain my BH's love and forgiveness, who looks at her past actions with disgust and hatred, I hated this book. I had to go and search for reviews on the web to see if I was the only one who felt that way. Thankfully, I am not. But it saddens me the people - women mostly - who buy into drivel like this and use it to fuel their own imagined dissatisfaction with their husbands and lives in general.

Wulffie, there is no easy fix for the flourishing "good infidelity" industry.

It does seem to somehow be related to a perversion of the otherwise worthwhile female-equality movement, to the effect of "We are free enough to be sluts, and self-entitled to get away with it."

So from "The English Patient", to "The Whore's Horse Whisperer", to "Gosford Park" (all proving that Kirsten Scott Thomas has made "slut" a profitable niche casting), to "Bridges of Madison County", et cetera, ad nauseum, there just appears to be no end to the genre.

Are we certain that selected book-burnings were not, after all, a good idea?

I read that book several years ago and my mom just gave it back.

IIRC, her other books are about the same.

There're so many old favourites ruined for me now.

Gone with the Wind, Wuthering Heights, Bette Davis smooching up to the French bloke in Now Voyager (and brainwashing the CoM!) .. The list is endless.

And I never even pinpointed the issue of adultery most of the time.

I have a top degree in literature from a pretty good university. I discussed issues re women, slavery, class, race ... Never mentioned adultery in a single essay. Never even spotted it.

Truly, my education began here.

I was waiting for the part where the BH meets a Mermaid, they fall in love, and he becomes a merman. Tell me there's at least a unicorn in the book.