Author of the week: Julie Metz

last updated 8 January 2015

Julie Metz is the rare wife willing to tell the world about her husband’s infidelity, said Louise France in the London Observer. “You’re supposed to tough it out, not talk about it,” says the first-time author. A woman usually holds her tongue due to shame, she says—or divorce agreements. But the New York native didn’t have any lawyers to worry about when writing her blistering new memoir, Perfection. Her cheating husband died six months before she even learned of his affairs. “I was able to write this book because he died, and only because he died,” she says. One thing Metz learned: Losing a husband to cardiac arrest, even a charming 44-year-old husband, isn’t the worst thing a wife and mother can go through. “To lose someone a second time in the way I did,” she says, “was more terrible.”

Metz’s path to recovery took some surprising turns, said Jesse Kornbluth in Huffingtonpost.com. Instead of avoiding the details of her spouse’s affairs, she tracked down several of his lovers. “There was no other way to find out what had happened in my marriage,” she says. Her husband was apparently unraveling near the end, taking increasing risks as a deadline approached on a book that was still only one paragraph long. In the course of completing her own book, Metz fortunately discovered that she was capable of moving on. “On a good day,” she says, “I don’t think about him at all.”