Still Life with Husband

“Why would a woman - and it seems like it’s always women - do that to herself?”

And so starts the musings of Lauren Fox in Still Life with Husband. Stuck in a world where gender roles are spilling into every aspect of her life, Emily is struggling to resist the urge to conform and dealing with the onslaught of confusion that her refusal is causing. At 30, Emily’s biological clock hasn’t even been set, a fact that’s a hard realization to her husband and those around her, such as her mother who is desperate to be a grandmother and her pregnant best friend, Meg. Her husband and her best friend are moving in separate directions and Emily watches as they slip out of her realm of the world and into a place that she is completely unfamiliar with.

In her debut novel, Lauren Fox weaves a story of friendship and marriage in this novel that tugs on your heartstrings in a completely honest, yet entertaining way. Fox successfully muddies the lines of right and wrong as she takes the reader on a story about personal survival and hurting someone you love.

I am Emily. I’ve been Emily before or at least, I’ve wanted to be. The raw and uncensored emotion that Fox creates leads the reader feeling a barrage of emotions as they turn each page. Fox describes the portrait of an honest woman who is not content to slip into her expected role of a doting wife and mother while exploring the notion of a woman getting exactly what she wants and dealing with the consequences of it.

Still Life with Husband mixes the humorous and honest story of a woman who you know, the woman you have been, or the woman you’ve madly tried to understand.

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