Doe maar alsof

by Bridget Asher, Karin Pijl (Translator)

Hoe zou je leven eruit zien als je toch bij die ene ex was gebleven?

Gwen is eraan gewend weinig aandacht en liefde te krijgen. Haar vader, een zeebioloog, stortte zich na de dood van haar moeder volledig op zijn werk. En haar man, de altijd even beheerste en brave Peter brengt ook weinig opwinding in haar leven. Als ze plotseling haar ex-vriendje van vroeger, de uitbundige Alex tegenkomt, herinnert ze zich hun intense liefde als de dag van gisteren. Als Alex haar vraagt om te doen alsof ze zijn verloofde is zodat hij de laatste wens van zijn stervende moeder kan vervullen, besluit Gwen met instemming van Peter om op zijn verzoek in te gaan. Voor één weekend maar, wat kan het voor kwaad?
Eenmaal opgenomen in Alex warme en eigenzinnige familie, begint Gwen zich langzaam af te vragen wat het begrip liefde nu eigenlijk voor haar betekent. Terwijl ze de ware toedracht van haar moeders dood ontrafelt begint het erop te lijken dat haar gespeelde relatie met Alex wel eens meer zou kunnen betekenen dan ze denkt

Genres: Chick Lit, Fiction, Romance, Contemporary, Adult Fiction, Book Club, Marriage

Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2009

About the author

Julianna Baggott
aka
Bridget Asher & N.E. Bode

Borned on 30 September 1969, she teaches at Florida State University. She's married to David G.W. Scott and has four kids. Along with her husband, she is a co-founder of the nonprofit organization Kids in Need - Books in Deed., getting free books to underprivileged kids in Florida.

Today, she is a critically acclaimed and bestselling author, who wrote novels and poetry, and who has over fifty overseas editions of her books. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Best American Poetry, Best Creative Nonfiction, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, All Things Considered, and Here & Now. For two years, her alter-ego, N. E. Bode was a recurring personality on XM Radio. Her work has been a People Magazine pick alongside David Sedaris and Bill Clinton, a Washington Post Book of the Week, a Girl's Life Top Ten, a Booksense selection, and a Starbucks Bookish Reading Club pick.

Reviews

[Michelle]

This book was kind of entertaining, but I agree with other reviewers who asked, "What about the main character could you fall in love with?" She was kind of lost, and didn't have many defining characteristics, if any. Also, the author seemed to be a believer in the sort of nebulous, squishy "working through issues" view of things. I have lost a parent, and I still wanted to yell at the main character, "Ok, you lost your mom over 20 years ago! Do you have to mention it on every single page?" I found most characters unlikeable, except for Elliot and his family. I probably would not try another book by this author.

[Mo]

I started reading this book before the holidays, and put it aside so that I could read something a little more "Christmas-y". I should have just left it on the shelf - where it belonged.

[Christi]

I just never got this book. Maybe because I didn't care for the main character?

Basically, she's never really happy. But she's happy settling. Because she just doesn't really do anything about it except change jobs often.

Until one day a guy she dated for 2 weeks (2 weeks!!) in college shows up behind her at an ice cream parlor. And her husband invites this guy to a party. And then this guy tells everyone at the party how he is pretending to be married to make his dying mother happy. So of course one of her drunk friends says she should go pretend to be the wife. And her drunk husband agrees.

Seriously? Only in fiction could this kind of thing happen in the first few pages of a book.

Oh, and that guy she dated in college dumped her after the 2 weeks to go back to his girlfriend but somehow he's been in love with her for all these years and hasn't stopped thinking about her despite being engaged twice. Yeah, that really happens too.

[Helen]

When Gwen Merchant unexpectedly bumps into Elliot Hull, a man whom she had dated furiously for three weeks during college, her seemingly perfect life and perfect marriage are dragged under a microscope for examination. It isn’t until what could have been presents itself that Gwen begins to question the difference between love and marriage. At the encouragement of her husband, Gwen poses as Elliot’s wife in order to appease his mother Vivian on her deathbed. At the dying woman’s insistence, Gwen sets out to discover the truth…and finds more truth than she was prepared for.

The Pretend Wife will lend itself to rich book discussions as the marital, end of life, and communication issues provide a minefield of true-to-life grey areas.

[Sue]

(Spoiler alert) I was liking this book until the end and trying to figure out how I wanted it to end. I was torn, because I wanted Gwen and Elliot to have their grand love affair, but I felt bad because she was more or less happily married. But, I lost a lost of respect for the author by wrapping it up neatly by making us hate the husband at the end. Should have kept the depth and not taken the cheap way out.

[Ramona]

This was by far the best book I have read in a long time. The book starts off with 2 men rolling around on the lawn fighting. Then we get the back story of how that came to be. Gwen Merchant is standing in line at an ice cream shop when a man behind her orders 2 scoops of Gwen Merchant. When she turns around it is a guy she knew had dated in college, Elliot Hull. She introduces him to her husband Peter and he ends up going to a party with them.

During the party Gwen chokes on some food and Elliot saves her life. Peter says he owes him and tells him he can have anything he wants. Well, Elliot goes on to say that his mother is dying of cancer and she's been afraid that he will be all alone and have no one to take care of him so he lied and told her he eloped.

So they come to an agreement that Gwen will be his pretend wife for the weekend and the story really takes off from there and it has lots of twists and it ends exactly the way I had hoped it would!

FABULOUS!

[★¸. • * ° * ༺*Blanka*༺*°°*•.¸. ♥★]

P.W.

Married woman Gwen Merchant agrees to pretend to be the newlywed of former beau Elliott Hull to appease his dying mom. Gwen, smothering in a marriage to Peter, jumps at the chance for a redo at an abruptly ended college romance, and it's a slippery slope that Gwen slides down with passion and verve, falling in love with Elliott and becoming attached to his sister and her precocious kids and the imperious and uncannily perceptive matriarch, Vivian. But while weaving one faux relationship, Gwen unthreads the very real sadness in her own tattered family, including a widowed dad and a marriage that hides more than it confides.

[Natalie]

Here's a good summer fluff by the pool read. People magazine recommended it for summer reading and it totally does it justice. If you ran into the guy that got away and he asked you to be his pretend wife for a weekend to fulfill his dying mom's wish- would you? Would you if you were already married to a good guy who said it was ok? This is a fun, sweet look into life and love and discovering what's important in life and relationships.

[Sam]

What a sweet book, really enjoyable. And in addition to being sweet, the writing was smart with none of that awkward diction or overwrought flourishes I associate with chick lit. And I liked how the central plot--a woman who poses as a former boyfriend's wife for the weekend because his mother is dying of cancer--actually foregrounds much larger issues of loss, history, regret, passion and "two paths that diverged in a yellow wood."

[Marieke | Marieke's Books]

Vanaf de eerste bladzijde was ik dol op dit boek. De personage vond ik geweldig, ze waren zo levendig. Ik kon het boek niet meer wegleggen, zodra ik eenmaal begonnen was. Zeker een aanrader!

[Tracey Smith]

This was finally my summer “fluff” book and I was disappointed. I just didn’t feel the chemistry between the main characters, not enough description. Also, who names a love interest Elliot?!?! It wasn’t a book I researched or had heard anything about, but was hoping it would be a impulsive gem...it was not. On to the next one 🙂.

[Peg]

Absolutely LOVED it!! I love how it started, I LOVE how it ended. Pitch perfect!!!
Even better than "My Husband's Sweethearts"! I want more!

[Nolan]

When Elliot Hull knew her, she was Gwen Merchant. They were briefly an item in college, and Gwen remembers that stretch fondly. They rented racquets and played racquetball on courts with folding metal handles and glass back walls. They walked each other to class. They claimed a library basement conference room with a note that read Reserved for the Albanian Student Union of Perverse Sexuality Club, scribbled in a time slot, and had sex against the chalkboard. One night at a bar, she slapped him and ended the relationship.

Years later she has been married three years to Peter Stevens, an anesthesiologist. She and Peter run into Elliot in a Baltimore ice cream parlor, where they had gone to push back against the summer heat. Elliot and Peter strike up an instant rapport, and within minutes Elliot agrees to attend a party thrown by Helen, an unmarried friend of the couple. At the party Gwen chokes. Elliot performs the Heimlich. Peter, quite drunk, decides he owes Elliot for saving her life. Reluctantly, Elliot confesses that he recently lied to his mother, Vivian, who has cancer, about his marital status. He told her he was happily married, assuming the morphine would erase the conversation. It did not. Now he needs to arrive at a family function with a wife. Peter expansively insists he would be fine if Gwen took on that persona for a few days. The next morning a sober Peter questions the wisdom of that brash agreement. Gwen has thought of Elliot often and knows she once loved him. She decides to play the role and goes to the Hull family's lake house for the weekend.

Gwen is introduced there as Elizabeth. Vivian sees through the deception and still offers real kindness. She later tells Gwen to tell him the truth. Gwen soon realizes she misses the love Elliot offered. His sister, Jennifer, knows the marriage is a sham and still extends real affection. Gwen describes Peter's efforts as dispensing packets of love. At first those packets were enough. A stolen kiss during a late-night rowboat ride with Elliot helps her see how unimpressive Peter's love really is.

If you enjoy snappy dialogue, funny in a place or two and unblinking besides, this could be a good reading choice. Sex against a chalkboard is not an image you shake off. The book is not a typical romance that moves from a memorable meeting through a breakup and on to a joyous, even tear-filled reunion. This is the story of a deliberate decision that became inevitable behavior and forever altered lives.

To the author's credit, she does not let Gwen and Elliot squeak the bedsprings, capsize the rowboat, or go looking for a chalkboard. But she gets some things fundamentally wrong.

“But, of course, it couldn’t really end. Elliot was in love with me and I was in love with him, although we hadn’t said it aloud in uncertain terms. This was our predicament, and it was worse than having an affair, wasn’t it? Although it wasn’t as wrong as an affair, maybe, because what we felt for each other was out of our control, it made everything more complicated.”

It wasn’t as wrong as an affair? Gwen thinks she has no control over her emotions? That felt like a cop-out in a cheap suit. Get some outside perspective. Try marriage counseling, or whatever would force the question into the open. Take time to make sure the decision is not based on lust, which is what this looks like. After you weigh the reasons to stay, if the reasons to leave still matter more and run longer, then do what you must. People will philosophize all day about the brain’s lack of authority over the heart, but decisions can still intervene. Life with the anesthesiologist may have numbed Gwen to the exhilaration of old love revived. She is far from the helpless, hapless victim of a tyrannical heart.

Flip Wilson, the old comic with the catchphrase, could get a laugh with “The devil made me do it,” because everyone watching understood you do not shrug control of your conduct onto someone else. The societal quicksand has shifted. Today that line might earn a support group instead of a laugh track. Poor little Gwen, unable to control a thing, is Flip Wilson without the joke, and the premise is more sinister for the missing laughter.

Peter, for his part, does the hot box hop with Helen, Gwen’s supposed friend. That betrayal likely means no amount of counseling would have saved the marriage, but you never know. Forgiveness is a strange and wonderful thing. The author never poses it as a possibility for anyone. It sits irrevocably off the table. They did not have children, which is fortunate. Even so, Gwen and Peter’s lives can never be the same. You never really know how Gwen and Elliot come out. Indications are that they at least come together. Whether they stay that way lives only in the author’s head. Turning a sham marriage into a real relationship may happen more often than we think. It still looks like a wobbly way to begin.

I cannot do better than two stars. The book made me smile, and it also troubled me deeply. You have to read this author in layers. On the surface the book can look as if an anti-family, anti-marriage message is the currency it trades on. Helen voices that toxicity outright. Dig deeper and some of it burns off. Vivian’s kindness, and the love Elliot has for her, stand out and make the novel better than it would otherwise be. Jennifer clearly loves her brother, her mother, and her two kids, though why anyone would name a child Porcupine sits outside my understanding. That genuine love, and the real if clumsy love Gwen’s widowed father offers her, expunges some of the anti-family poison.

The author also follows Gwen’s relationship with that father, a professor who studies fish vocalizations. Gwen’s mother drowned when Gwen was five. They were driving when the accident put them both in the water. A good Samaritan pulled Gwen to safety. Her mother was already dead. Gwen and her father work through her sense of abandonment and guilt, the feeling they could have saved her mother if they had helped her first. That feeling is not true, but it is powerful. Still, I did not need to meet that guilt on every page. It grew tiresome.

I am in no way denouncing the author’s talent. Bridget Asher is the name Julianna Baggott used for her adult fiction, and this 2009 novel was her second under that name. She writes well and memorably. I struggled with some of the plot elements, and that struggle dampened my appreciation for the book.

[Shelley]

One star seems pretty harsh, so I made it a two, but it's just barely a "it was okay" rating.

It sounded like it was going to be a pretty interesting story plot that is until I started working myself through it. Then my brain basically went dead. It's a light read, but with a pretty depressing cast of characters.

The main character, Gwen wasn't even likable, and the only one even more unlikable was her husband, Peter. Their marriage was a "safe" and "respectable" marriage, in other words they were playing marriage, and not living marriage. That is until she bumps into her old college boyfriend, Elliot, who they only dated for two weeks. Elliot's mother is dying, and he asks Gwen to be his "pretend wife". So we spend the rest of the story reading if Gwen should be content with Peter, or finally feel life for the first time with Elliott?

Predictable story. No surprises.

A couple of good points about the book: It's a fast read and I'm done!

[Wendy]

Was it just the right book, at the right time? I don't know, but I loved this book. I almost gave it five stars, but I'll have to read it again before I give it that honor.

I thoroughly enjoyed the characters, and the style of writing. I loved the metaphors she used, such as, standing in a field holding a rake over your head to ward off the eagles that might carry you off, to represent facing your fears. This book was such a good description of living an examined, thoughtful life.

All in all, I was delightfully surprised by how much I got out of what I thought would be a simple lark of a story.

[Kristy W]

Maybe even five starts, not sure. But I really liked this book. At first I wasn't so sure, seemed like it might be about infidelity, and I really don't like reading about that, or I thought maybe it would be a silly romantic comedy, but it turned out to be about love and grief and being truly happy. A really sweet, engaging story with characters you could really understand.

[Amy]

I thought at first that I would dislike this book - it seemed kind of "fluffy" - but turned out to be a good read - a married woman agrees to pretend to be the wife of an old boyfriend - has to confront issues from her past and present life.

[Anna]

Chick lit with depth. I'll probably look for more of her books. She does a far better job with dialogue than most people. Actually sound like real conversations! And I like that she didn't give the main character an easy way out.

[Sandygator]

Storyline was totally unbelievable. No husband would let someone pretend to be married to someone else. And all the perfect happy endings including the miraculous recovery of the dying Mother. Gwen was boring. And spent most of the book moping. Get a life!

[Valdez]

Another of my adultery books, and this is a great one! It's about growing up fearful, and finally learning to move past your fears to have a full and joyful life.

[Tony]

I imagine this book was aimed at certain demographics which I wasn't part of and as a result I did not enjoy it that much. The story line itself was not too bad but it was very corny in parts, so much so that it became irritating. In my opinion the relationships between the characters were not developed enough, from one moment meeting someone for the first time and the next day they are the mother they never had. It raised some questions about marriage/relationships but did not provide any real answers. Just an OK novel.

[Melanie is on Storygraph]

I was actually kind of surprised when I finished the book and checked the publication date - it had a very late 90s feel to me, if that makes sense. The style of writing and the story and the way the characters acted...
I liked Vivian a lot and her advice was really lovely. I was a little annoyed by Gwen in a lot go ways, and I felt like her friendships and marriage weren’t well fleshed out - but maybe that was to say something about what they were? I now it’s not, but this read a lot like a first novel, a bit rough around the edges, which is not a bad thing - it’s kind of charming.

[Raina Meyer]

I really, really enjoyed this. It felt like a perfect combination of a light romance novel and a deeper examination of family secrets and romantic obligations. Maybe it’s because I’ve lost my mom as well, but I really liked how familial trauma was described and how it highlighted the profound damage that burying grief and feelings can cause, even if it’s not malicious. The writing was good and engaging, and it was easy to speed through. It might’ve been a bit predictable at times, but all in all, this is probably my favorite kind of book.

[Melissa]

I kept putting this book down whenever I got a new book so I forced myself to finish it while waiting for another new one. For just randomly finding it in the library, it was decent. It started a little slow, but it picked up the pace at the end.

[Sharon]

I wasn't sure about the story line and the writing initially. But something drew me in and I'm glad I did. I enjoyed the book. I was intrigued by the story. I liked the characters. I'm very happy stayed with it.

[Ciara Hartman]

No spice per say in this book, but very enjoyable tangled love story. I could relate to having loved someone for years, but letting other things get in the way and going down separate paths, and then years later coming together again and realizing that you never stopped loving each other.

[Gail Burgess]

A fun read for me. I enjoy Hallmark movies and this was similar -- although I guess Hallmark rarely has an unhappy marriage, complicated past, former boyfriend, cheating husband, etc. Which may make one wonder why it was a fun read... An escape? Interesting characters? Sure.

[Ann Koenig]

This is a very light book easy to read on a plane flight

[Chloe]

I picked this up off the library shelf the other day. I must have been in a hurry and mustn't have read the blurb properly.

Not my cup of tea. But, others might enjoy it.

[Julie]

This book at first is about pretend and finding something that is real.