Meredith Monday Schwartz

She doesn't hold back about her own emotional state, her shock, her sadness.

But those scenes are also exactly why I don't read a lot of books where adultery is involved.

This is just a really hard thing for me to sit with.

And those pieces are difficult to read in this book.

And the sadness honestly doesn't stop there.

There is so much sadness in this book.

Sadness about that initial betrayal, yes, but also about how everything changes.

is going to affect their kids, which is clearly top of mind for the author.

Sadness as she tries to figure out how to manage her own life because she's been a stay-at-home mom living a very, very, very privileged existence where her husband took care of everything.

And now she realizes she didn't really know anything about running her own life.

There's sadness about her social standing having changed.

This is a very big focus.

Her social standing changes, how her friendships and her family relationships shift.

She writes about all of it in a really unflinching way.

And I think a lot of people are going to feel very seen by those parts of the book.

But then there's this elephant in the room.

And I think you can't talk about this book without talking about it.

Belle's husband was a former hedge fund manager.

She's an attorney, but she didn't have to work.

They had an apartment in New York City and a home on Martha's Vineyard, and they lived this extraordinarily privileged life, which she admits to.