Barbara‘s Pick
June, 2025
You Should Have Known/The Undoing
Jean Hanff Korelitz
Grand Central Publishing, March 18. 2014
I had just finished this author‘s most recent thriller and decided to look through her other works to find my next read. Since this book has been adapted for an HBO production starring Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman, it made the choice easy!
The main character is a marriage therapist who posits in her about-to-be-published book that “you should have known” your partner’s future behavior based on your dating interactions. The story turns on its head when something horrible happens involving her husband and she realizes she’s been fooled for many years.
Korelitz is as adept at drawing not only cutthroat private-school mothers and therapists, but also police backstories, allowing her readers to intimately understand those worlds. I know nothing about these worlds, but I feel like I’ve learned a lot. You don’t always get that from a fiction book!