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Jan
11
Book Review: Love and Other Natural Disasters by Holly Shumas
2009 at 11am Posted by Rebecca Joines Schinsky
Recently published January 8, 2009
Eve is finally having what seems to be the perfect Thanksgiving. With their second child on the way, she and her husband Jonathon have settled into their newly suburban life and are hosting their very first holiday in their new home. Their mothers seem to be getting along reasonably well, their son Jacob is behaving, and Eve is feeling “almost painfully grateful for my own bounty, for the abundance that is my life, for everything that brought me to this moment, with these people, inside this light.”
Until the phone rings and Jon gets up to answer it in the bedroom.
Noticing that her husband has been gone for more than a few minutes and wondering why he isn’t being more considerate of their guests, Eve goes to find out what’s taking so long. As she approaches their bedroom door, she hears Jonathon saying “Shhh, you’re going to be okay” in a rather intimate voice to someone she has never heard of. When she enters the room, Jon attempts to end the conversation, but Eve hears a distinctly feminine voice coming through the receiver. When she questions him, Jon says he was talking to a friend who gets lonely during the holidays. She’s “just a friend” he met a conference; she lives in Chicago (they live outside San Francisos); they talk sometimes and exchange emails. Jon is doing his best to make it seem like his relationship with this other woman, this “just a friend” is no big deal, but Eve is shocked and heartbroken, wondering
Would he really cheat on me, when I would be having his baby in just over a month?
Jon reveals that the woman’s name is Laney and that they talk weekly and email several times a day, and Eve cannot believe what she is hearing. Her husband is sharing his life, his personal thoughts, his precious time with some other woman. What else has he shared with her? Jon insists “But there’s nothing physical between us. I wouldn’t do that;” but Eve feels betrayed nonetheless and asks him to leave.
Did I believe Jon loved me? Yes. But the value of his love—our love—changed that night. And what do you do with devalued love?
Love and Other Natural Disasters is Holly Shumas’s exploration of marriage, betrayal, and the ways in which an emotional affair can be just as (if not more) damaging as a sexual one. Shumas shows us Eve’s struggle to find understanding and support from her friends as she discovers that none of them thinks the emotional affair is quite as bad as a sexual one would have been. They don’t understand that, for Eve, knowing her husband has been giving his time, thoughts, and emotional energy to another woman calls into question the very foundation of their relationship and their commitment to each other.
After she kicks Jon out, Eve is blinded by pain, anger, and confusion. How could this have been going on without her noticing? Is Jon telling the truth when he says the relationship was never sexual? Who is this Laney person, and exactly how close are she and Jon? Unsatisfied by her husband’s answers to these questions, Eve commits her own betrayal by hacking into Jon’s email account and reading a year’s worth of emails between him and Laney. What she finds doesn’t make her feel any better, and the guilt she feels for reading Jon’s emails—combined with the difficulty of knowing about them but not being able to tell him she knows—makes it even more difficult to begin sorting through the situation and trying to mend their family.
Though she desperately wants to forgive Jon and to be able to trust him again, especially with their second baby coming so soon, Eve goes hot and cold several times, inviting Jon back into her life only to become angry again and to, again, push him away. When the baby, Olivia, is born, Eve and Jon attempt to reforge their connection, but it just isn’t working.
When the children were present, he made a beeline for them. I couldn’t blame him fo rhungering for a lover that was uncomplicated, unsullied. I felt it, too. How could we feel so many of the same things and be so separate?
As they struggle to work things out, Eve asks Jon to go to therapy, but when he does, she doesn’t believe he is really working at it. Jon apologizes and explains over and over and feels that he is doing everything he can to make things right, and he doesn’t understand why Eve can’t move on. He wants her to take responsibility for the way she responded to his betrayal and for the smaller acts of betrayal she committed against him.
Along the way, we meet Eve and Jon’s best friends Tamara and Clayton, who want Eve to forgive Jon; Eve’s younger, immature brother Charlie, who moves in to help care of her kids and (surprise, surprise) grows up along the way; Lil, Eve’s new friend who understands the betrayal of an emotional affair and encourages Eve to start dating again; and Ray, a charismatic professor Eve begins dating in “an act of hope.” These subplots add a bit of color to Eve and Jon’s story, but the characters are rather flat and stereotypical, and their actions are rather predictable.
Love and Other Natural Disasters is a quick, engaging read, and Shumas’s examination of marriage and betrayal is insightful and relatively well-written. It is clear that her work as a marriage and family therapist has given her a clear understanding of the nature of emotional affairs and the ways in which they are just as serious and damaging as sexual ones; but it also seems that it makes the dialogue a bit dry and scripted at points. When they discuss their marriage and the potential for a future together, Eve and Jon often sound like they are sitting in therapy, parroting some new communication technique. Overall, though, this is a good (but not great) read that I would recommend to fans of chick lit and anyone interested in a different perspective on marriage and betrayal. 3.5 out of 5.
Thanks to Miriam at Hachette Book Group for sending me Love and Other Natural Disasters.
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I enjoyed this book, too. I’d never really given much thought to the impact of an emotional affair until I read it.
Wonderful review…and thanks for sharing…I have this one in my review/to read pile and hope to get to it this month.
I agree that an emotional affair can be more damaging than a sexual affair. Sounds like an interesting read.
Ohhhh this looks juicy. I agree with the others. I’ve never thought much about the impact an emotional affair would have on a marriage.
[...] Book Review: Love and Other Natural Disasters by Holly Shumas [...]
Sounds like a good read, thanks for the great review.
I enjoyed this one, but agree that it was good but not great
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