What do you think?
Rate this book
Wife Living Dangerously
Suburban wife and mother, Julia Flanagan is good to a fault. She always plays by the rules, does what she’s told and puts her family first. To be honest, her life’s become rather dull – and her sex life is humdrum, to say the least. But all that changes when Julia’s best friends dare her to start living dangerously. At first, she only breaks little rules – mixing her recyclables, illegally downloading music – but when Julia meets a handsome professor at work, she finds that having started to live dangerously it’s hard to stop…
Paperback
First published May 1, 2006
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 9, 2019
The slippery slope of deceit and bad behaviour is a steep one and one on which it’s hard to turn back once you’re heading downhill.
It starts gently – in Julia’s case, it’s a simple case of mixing her glass bottles in with the plastics in the recycling bin. Then it accelerates through illegally downloading music off the internet and not telling cashiers who make a mistake in her favour. Of course, there’s nowhere else it could possibly end up than in the arms of a professor of Medieval literature. It’s inevitable really – and that’s not a plot spoiler. In the second paragraph of this book, our ‘heroine’ has already revealed her affair so there’s no ‘will they, won’t they’ to look forward to, just another 273 pages of ‘why’ and ‘how’.
Julia is a perfect example of a suburban wife and mother with a successful husband, three beautiful children and a pleasant home. She has an interesting and fulfilling job working at an institute that studies sexual behaviour (how bizarre! – the job that is, not the idea of studying sexual behaviour) and a great circle of friends. So why should she feel that something is missing from her life? She and her friends get together, over-indulge in alcohol and then light their ‘Candle of Truth’, challenging each other to reveal some or other dirty secret. Julia can’t come up with anything naughtier than telling them she put on lip-gloss when she knew the parcel delivery man with the ponytail and the ‘great ass’ was due to arrive at her house. She wasn’t trying to seduce him; she just wanted to look nice. Her friends can’t contain their derision. Placing her hand on a Bible she’s told to take an oath that she will “live dangerously” and so she sets out to do just that.
Which of course raises questions in the minds of the reader: ‘What’s wrong with being a little bit dull? What’s wrong with being a decent, honest, clean-living human being? And what’s so aspirational about cheating on your husband?
Julia’s husband is having his own mid-life crisis. He’s joined a band and is playing his sax with a bunch of old friends, out every weekend playing in bars and clubs and reliving a youth he never had the chance to enjoy because he was studying so hard to become a lawyer. Now that’s a midlife crisis I can relate to. Rushing off to shag a good looking history professor who believes in the medieval concept of courtly love just doesn’t make sense to me. I know we’re supposed to side with the heroine in a book like this but I just wanted to slap her and say “Can’t you see how stupid you are being?” Affairs based on overwhelming and irresistible lust make some kind of sense, those based on neglect or abuse in the marriage are also understandable, but doing it with the intention of being more interesting must be the stupidest reason known to woman-kind for putting your family in jeopardy.
You’ll have guessed no doubt by this point that I’m not a fan of chick lit in general, and even more opposed to tomes about middle-class mid-life angst. The world is full of topics worth writing about – starving children, battered wives, homeless people living on the streets and when lined up against those, the silly pathetic affair of a woman old enough and smart enough to know better adds very little to the sum of human entertainment or endeavour. The bookshelves of the nation are filled with much more fulfilling and inventive tales of affairs and the conflict they create which are much more worth reading than this superficial nonsense. There’s absolutely no examination of the pros and cons of getting yourself into such a mess, no sense of thought about the possible consequences, just a jolly ‘Here we go’ and she’s off and running.
There may be many women who’ll pick up this book and think ‘My life could be more exciting’ – I can only hope they’ll take up paragliding or Chinese lessons instead of chasing down the first available handsome semi-stranger for some furtive fumbling. The ‘love interest’ in this one is too good to be true and so one-dimensional that he adds no depth or breadth to the issues raised. There’s no need for me to go into too much detail so I’ll keep this brief – this is a nasty little book that doesn’t deserve your attention.
It starts gently – in Julia’s case, it’s a simple case of mixing her glass bottles in with the plastics in the recycling bin. Then it accelerates through illegally downloading music off the internet and not telling cashiers who make a mistake in her favour. Of course, there’s nowhere else it could possibly end up than in the arms of a professor of Medieval literature. It’s inevitable really – and that’s not a plot spoiler. In the second paragraph of this book, our ‘heroine’ has already revealed her affair so there’s no ‘will they, won’t they’ to look forward to, just another 273 pages of ‘why’ and ‘how’.
Julia is a perfect example of a suburban wife and mother with a successful husband, three beautiful children and a pleasant home. She has an interesting and fulfilling job working at an institute that studies sexual behaviour (how bizarre! – the job that is, not the idea of studying sexual behaviour) and a great circle of friends. So why should she feel that something is missing from her life? She and her friends get together, over-indulge in alcohol and then light their ‘Candle of Truth’, challenging each other to reveal some or other dirty secret. Julia can’t come up with anything naughtier than telling them she put on lip-gloss when she knew the parcel delivery man with the ponytail and the ‘great ass’ was due to arrive at her house. She wasn’t trying to seduce him; she just wanted to look nice. Her friends can’t contain their derision. Placing her hand on a Bible she’s told to take an oath that she will “live dangerously” and so she sets out to do just that.
Which of course raises questions in the minds of the reader: ‘What’s wrong with being a little bit dull? What’s wrong with being a decent, honest, clean-living human being? And what’s so aspirational about cheating on your husband?
Julia’s husband is having his own mid-life crisis. He’s joined a band and is playing his sax with a bunch of old friends, out every weekend playing in bars and clubs and reliving a youth he never had the chance to enjoy because he was studying so hard to become a lawyer. Now that’s a midlife crisis I can relate to. Rushing off to shag a good looking history professor who believes in the medieval concept of courtly love just doesn’t make sense to me. I know we’re supposed to side with the heroine in a book like this but I just wanted to slap her and say “Can’t you see how stupid you are being?” Affairs based on overwhelming and irresistible lust make some kind of sense, those based on neglect or abuse in the marriage are also understandable, but doing it with the intention of being more interesting must be the stupidest reason known to woman-kind for putting your family in jeopardy.
You’ll have guessed no doubt by this point that I’m not a fan of chick lit in general, and even more opposed to tomes about middle-class mid-life angst. The world is full of topics worth writing about – starving children, battered wives, homeless people living on the streets and when lined up against those, the silly pathetic affair of a woman old enough and smart enough to know better adds very little to the sum of human entertainment or endeavour. The bookshelves of the nation are filled with much more fulfilling and inventive tales of affairs and the conflict they create which are much more worth reading than this superficial nonsense. There’s absolutely no examination of the pros and cons of getting yourself into such a mess, no sense of thought about the possible consequences, just a jolly ‘Here we go’ and she’s off and running.
There may be many women who’ll pick up this book and think ‘My life could be more exciting’ – I can only hope they’ll take up paragliding or Chinese lessons instead of chasing down the first available handsome semi-stranger for some furtive fumbling. The ‘love interest’ in this one is too good to be true and so one-dimensional that he adds no depth or breadth to the issues raised. There’s no need for me to go into too much detail so I’ll keep this brief – this is a nasty little book that doesn’t deserve your attention.
April 10, 2023
Characters were just a tad too flat and there wasn't enough depth into the story. However there were a few heart wrenching moments and I was pretty much satisfied with how things turned out which made me reconsider giving the book away.
April 11, 2023
Characters were just a tad too flat and there wasn't enough depth into the story. However there were a few heart wrenching moments and I was pretty much satisfied with how things turned out which made me reconsider giving the book away.
October 24, 2018
Okay a little repetitive, not much of a story.
May 3, 2022
Can’t believe this was a book from the 1980s , well before it’s time
May 5, 2012
the best book i've read this year so far some of the quotes are brilliant eg I've prefered to let others make the waves while i stand close to shore watching.
The way she even explains in detail how her other half sees her new haircut as like an insurance agent appraising crash damage (we have all been there)10/10
The way she even explains in detail how her other half sees her new haircut as like an insurance agent appraising crash damage (we have all been there)10/10
January 25, 2010
I liked the casual style of D. Kents writing but the characters were a little bit flat. The book has it's funny moments, such as in the situation of buying a pet for Julias Children, when she pretents the rat is a norwegian guinea pig called "Homer".
Read
May 9, 2008good fun
February 8, 2013
Not as bad as I thought it would be, not something that will make one jump with joy either.
January 19, 2013
Not as bad as I thought it would be, not something that will make one jump with joy either.
February 23, 2016
Not bad. A couple of laugh out loud moments. Light quick read
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews