{"id":1647,"date":"2009-07-14T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2009-07-14T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/mojo\/?p=1647"},"modified":"2025-07-31T11:48:24","modified_gmt":"2025-07-31T16:48:24","slug":"update-on-the-creepy-book","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/blog\/update-on-the-creepy-book\/","title":{"rendered":"Update on the creepy book."},"content":{"rendered":"

Okay, I\u2019m about halfway through The Actor and the Housewife<\/em><\/a> and things have started to become a little clearer.<\/p>\n

The actor is clearly in love with the housewife; I don\u2019t believe he is in denial about this, although he puts up a good act. Because he\u2019s an actor. Heh. He\u2019s a nice man.<\/p>\n

The housewife is in complete and total denial. On purpose. She\u2019s smart; she knows what\u2019s up. She doesn\u2019t want to deal with it because it\u2019s gonna be nasty messy and painful. That is to say, she\u2019s bored and she\u2019s lonely and she\u2019s completely unappreciated and she\u2019s not getting much in the way of sexual healing from her husband. So handsome clever dude comes along and appreciates her as a woman, and of course it\u2019s gonna go to her head. All the while she\u2019s saying, “I have the perfect husband and I love him so much!” What she needs to do is wake up and tell her husband they need marriage counseling. I don\u2019t excuse her actions. She\u2019s lying to herself. IMO, that\u2019s her biggest sin and she needs slapped.<\/p>\n

The husband is \u2026 not a creep or a dick or an asshole. He\u2019s lazy. Possibly stupid, but I\u2019m leaning toward lazy. He\u2019s lazy about his marriage. He\u2019s lazy about taking care of his wife. He\u2019s lazy about seeing her value to him as an unpaid (oh, but she gets room and board!) maid, chauffeur, nanny, and for the occasional (I think? He doesn\u2019t seem interested.) sexual favor. Maybe. If she pushes hard enough.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s disturbed by her relationship with the actor (who calls every day; tells her he misses her), but he doesn\u2019t notice when she\u2019s trying to be sexy for him and his idea of a romantic evening is sitting on the family room floor after the kids go to bed watching the ten o\u2019clock news and drinking chocolate milk\u2014and that\u2019s AFTER he\u2019s already had his little pout about her friendship with the actor. He never gets really mad and yells at her. He does a couple of really passive-aggressive things to let her know he\u2019s pouting. He can\u2019t even be bothered to manifest his jealousy properly. (Is he that sure of her or does he think she\u2019s not attractive enough? I can\u2019t tell.) Yet he\u2019s not disturbed enough to seduce her or romance her (or take what she offers, for that fact); either he doesn\u2019t know how or he doesn\u2019t see a need. Idiot lazy ass. You deserve to lose your wife to someone who\u2019d sweep her off her feet given half a chance. Oh wait. You already have. Fight for her, you stupid fuck.<\/p>\n

This is turning pretty dark with (dare I say it? I shall!) SPARKLES all over it to make it look like it\u2019s all bright and shiny and cute and fun, and that the housewife is the only one with a little problem.<\/p>\n

So far it\u2019s shaping up not to be so much the story of her (without doubt) emotional affair with a (IMO) pretty awesome dude who\u2019s head over heels in love with her.<\/p>\n

\"IllustrationIt\u2019s shaping up to be the story of an already fractured marriage that needs the x-ray of aforementioned affair to show it for what it is. It\u2019s not a spiral fracture or a comminuted fracture. It\u2019s not even a clean break. It\u2019s a stress fracture, the kind that gives you twinges of discomfort that you can ignore for a long time until it breaks and you\u2019re like, \u201cI didn\u2019t do anything to it!\u201d But catch it early enough, and all it\u2019ll need to heal is a cast and time and a helluva lot of TLC.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a quiet desperation about it that\u2019s starting to get heartbreaking (I have sprouted tears in a couple of spots). I suspect there are a lot of those kinds of marriages in the church. In a lot of churches. And outside them, too.<\/p>\n

And oh, it\u2019s so not chick lit. This is Women\u2019s Fiction with a capital W and capital F. Dark and angsty without letting you KNOW it\u2019s dark and angsty (and the bright perky cover is complicit in the deceit).<\/p>\n

If this is where Shannon Hale meant to go without letting the reader figure out where she\u2019s taking you, then I salute her. She\u2019s effing brilliant.<\/p>\n

But I haven\u2019t finished it, so I may again change my opinion. I shoulda waited until I was finished, but this is too dense with subtext not to share as I go along. I hope it\u2019s intentional. Dear Sister Hale, please don\u2019t pull a Stephenie Meyer on me. Please. Pretty please.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Okay, I\u2019m about halfway through The Actor and the Housewife and things have started to become a little clearer. The actor is clearly in love with the housewife; I don\u2019t believe he is in denial about this, although he puts up a good act. Because he\u2019s an actor. Heh. He\u2019s a nice man. The housewife […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[539,532,94,95,593],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1647","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genres","category-reading","category-religion","category-sex","category-womens-fiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1647"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16872,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1647\/revisions\/16872"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1647"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1647"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moriahjovan.com\/talesofdunham\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1647"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}