Once she and Nate move into their new home, more and more lies are told throwing their marriage into a tailspin.Įach chapter starts with an excerpt from books written from the late 19thc. Ali, who was fired from her high profile job, decides she will play the doting wife to cover up the lies she told her husband about the demise of her career. In 2018, Alice and her husband, Nate, move from NYC to a suburban money pit. Richard swept Nellie off her feet and she thought that she had found her prince charming, but as their marriage progresses, Nellie realizes that she married a controlling and abusive man who cares more about appearances than his wife.

In the early 1950s, Nellie, an early 20 something has married Richard, a man in his mid-thirties. If she will only listen quietly-a process that is painful to her-you may firmly, rationally, and kindly convince her she is not always in the right.” Walter Galichan, Modern Woman and How to Manager Her (1910).Ī reluctant housewife in the present finds herself drawn to a housewife from the 1950s in Recipe for a Perfect Wife. “ A modern woman who is of the contentious type is often amenable to love and reason. When Alice uncovers a more sinister–even dangerous–side to Nellie’s marriage, and has become increasingly dissatisfied with the mounting pressures in her own relationship, she begins to take control of her life and protect herself with a few secrets of her own. Soon Alice learns that while baked Alaska and meatloaf five ways may seem harmless, Nellie’s secrets may have been anything but. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she realizes that within the cookbook’s pages Nellie left clues about her life–including a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to her mother. But when she finds a vintage cookbook buried in a box in the old home’s basement, she becomes captivated by the cookbook’s previous owner–1950s housewife Nellie Murdoch. When Alice Hale leaves a career in publicity to become a writer and follows her husband to the New York suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. As she discovers remarkable parallels between this woman’s life and her own, it causes her to question the foundation of her own relationship with her husband–and what it means to be a wife fighting for her place in a patriarchal society. In this captivating dual narrative novel, a modern-day woman finds inspiration in hidden notes left by her home’s previous owner, a quintessential 1950s housewife.

Recipe for perfect wife