First published 2012
A woman in contemporary America wrestles with what she thought she knew about her marriage. An eighteenth-century Viennese couple discovers that proximity breeds both intimacy and deception. Across continents and centuries, Joan Wickersham's characters confront the same puzzle: we can live beside someone for years and never truly know their heart. These stories reveal how love operates through misunderstanding, how couples build entire relationships on assumptions that may be wrong. A husband hides his true feelings behind daily routines. A wife realizes she has been seeing only what she wanted to see. Each story peels back the surface of seemingly ordinary relationships to expose the gaps between what we think we know and what actually exists in another person's mind. Wickersham shows that even smart people deceive themselves about the ones they love most, and that the deepest intimacy often coexists with the most complete ignorance of another's inner life.
Genres: short-stories, literary-fiction, historical-fiction, contemporary
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: misunderstanding, unreliable-narrator
Setting: America, Vienna
Period: Contemporary, 18th-Century
224 pages · Hardcover · Knopf