The Wives: A Memoir

Summary

A powerful, intimate memoir of marriage and friendship that traces one woman’s experience joining a tightknit community of fellow army wives after leaving her New York City job to follow her enlisted husband.

Simone Gorrindo was twenty-seven and working her dream job in New York City when her new husband decided to join a special operations unit in the Army. When she made the difficult decision to leave behind the life she had made for the life he’d chosen, nothing could have prepared her for their new reality. Two weeks after their move to Georgia, he was deployed to Afghanistan, and she was left alone in the quiet of their little brick house on a military base.

Then she met the other women left behind.

Amidst the uncertainty and isolation, Simone was quickly swept up in the world of the other soldiers’ wives. Thrown together into the strangeness of a life none of them imagined for themselves, the women navigated marriage over monitored phone calls and intertwined their lives, enduring the long days and dark nights together as they awaited news from overseas. In an unfamiliar and foreign-feeling landscape, the wives became Simone’s reliable but imperfect compass, her true north.

The Wives is at once an intimate look into the inner lives of a remarkable group of women and a tender, unflinching portrait of a marriage. Its own kind of coming-of-age story, it asks difficult questions about how far we are willing to bend for those we love, what we owe each other, and who we are in the face of the unknown. Simone’s is an unputdownable story of human connection in a country divided, and a deeply personal account of what it means to find home—in each other, and in ourselves.