"Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective . . . Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands . .. as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era."
Description
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929—the story of a divorce and its aftermath, which scandalized the Jazz Age.
It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.
Reviews
“I’m tempted to simply type out a list of quotations from this book and call it a day, adding only a ‘BUY IT NOW!’ button at the bottom . . . The approach [feels] too advanced even for now. How did Ursula Parrott do it? . . . We must conclude that she possessed supernatural gifts of insight, as well as a talent for acid aphorisms and peppery dialogue . . . This edition features a gorgeous introduction by Alissa Bennett . . . Read if you like: Being wicked, shopping, breakfast for dinner, bearing distress with dignity, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles.”
“Ex-Wife presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms. She spent her days chasing a career, while her nights were a boozy smear of restaurants, speakeasies, and amorous encounters. She was exciting and discomfiting and morally questionable . . . But Ex-Wife, which is now being reissued (by McNally Editions) for the first time in more than thirty years, wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of cosmopolitan white women’s liberation that readers were primed to expect."
“[Let us] revel in the surprising freshness of its prose . . . Ex-Wife depicted remarkable erotic freedom . . . The other thing that glows in Ex-Wife, and the biography of its author, is New York City: the lights, the fights, the freedoms, constraints and terrible costs."
