My Husband – Maud Ventura

Do you ever read a book that makes you feel good about your life and your relationships in an… unexpected way? That’s the experience I had reading My Husband, a surprising debut novel by Maud Ventura (translated into English from the original French by Emma Ramadan).

The narrator of My Husband is a wife, mother, part-time teacher, and freelance translator. She has been married for thirteen years, and she is still madly in love with her husband – to put it mildly.

Their family is wealthy, they live on “the nicest house in the street”, and they have no real problems or traumas to speak of (which makes this book somewhat unique for a psychodrama) – except that the narrator’s obsessive love for her husband is all-consuming.

It might sound nice from the outside, but the narrator’s infatuation is revealed to be borderline pathological (though its relationship to her frequent experiences of synesthesia is never made entirely clear). She observes her husband so closely that everything is magnified. Every passing compliment, and every slight (real or imagined), takes on outsize significance in her inner world. When he tells her he loves her in the middle of the night unprompted, she is in raptures. When he pulls his hand away from hers and doesn’t put it back, she is devastated. Her close scrutiny makes her entirely unreliable as a narrator. It’s impossible for readers of My Husband to determine whether her husband is kind, cruel, or… just a guy.

The narrator’s obsession with her husband bleeds into all other aspects of her life, too. She resents her children, because they detract from the time and energy she and her husband would devote solely to each other. She is suspicious of her female friends, lest they become the subjects of any extramarital desire on her husband’s part. Even a friendly waitress at a local restaurant can’t escape becoming the focus of the narrator’s paranoia.

Ventura waits until the very last moment to finally break the tension that has been building since the opening chapter. My Husband begins on a Sunday, with the titular husband quietly mentioning to the narrator that they need to talk later. The story then skips back to the preceding Monday. Over the course of the week, the possibilities of what he could possibly want to talk about expand like vistas on the page. Is it the other men that the narrator sleeps with to prove how much she loves her husband? Is it an apology for the unfortunate Clementine Incident at a dinner party with friends? Has he found the secret notebooks in which she scribbles his marital crimes and their associated punishments, or the one where she notes all the relationship tips she finds in Cosmo? Is he leaving her? The sudden reveal is quickly followed by an Epilogue that really twists the knife of this narrative (honestly, I wondered if the story might have been more interesting and pensive without it).

My Husband is a very French novel about the toxicity of ‘great love’, and what happens when infatuation grows unchecked. And I must say, it made me feel well-adjusted by comparison.

Read My Husband on audiobook via Libro.fm here. (affiliate link)