Ex-Wife
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.

It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.
"1020027370"
Ex-Wife
An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.

It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.
19.99 Pre Order
Ex-Wife

Ex-Wife

by Ursula Parrott, Alissa Bennett, Marc Parrott

Narrated by Alissa Bennett

Unabridged

Ex-Wife

Ex-Wife

by Ursula Parrott, Alissa Bennett, Marc Parrott

Narrated by Alissa Bennett

Unabridged

Audiobook (Digital)

$19.99
FREE With a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime
$0.00

Free with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription | Cancel Anytime

START FREE TRIAL

Already Subscribed? 

Sign in to Your BN.com Account

Available for Pre-Order. This item will be released on September 24, 2024

Listen on the free Barnes & Noble NOOK app


Related collections and offers

FREE

with a B&N Audiobooks Subscription

Or Pay $19.99

Overview

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife is the story of a divorce and its aftermath that scandalized the Jazz Age—and still resonates today.

It's 1924, and Peter and Patricia have what looks to be a very modern marriage. Both drink. Both smoke. Both work, Patricia as a head copywriter at a major department store. When it comes to sex with other people, both believe in “the honesty policy.” Until they don‘t. Or, at least, until Peter doesn‘t—and a shell-shocked, lovesick Patricia finds herself starting out all over again, but this time around as a different kind of single woman: the ex-wife.

An instant bestseller when it was published anonymously in 1929, Ex-Wife captures the speakeasies, night clubs, and parties that defined Jazz Age New York—alongside the morning-after aspirin and calisthenics, the lunch-hour visits to the gym, the girl-talk, and the freedoms and anguish of solitude. It also casts a cool eye on the bedrooms and the doctor’s offices where, despite rising hemlines, the men still call the shots. The result is a unique view of what its author Ursula Parrott called “the era of the one-night stand”: an era very much like our own.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Published anonymously in 1929 and long out of print, this breezy novel addresses the timeless issues of love, dependence, infidelity and loss. From heroine Patricia's initial announcement, ``My husband left me four years ago,'' her story clips along at a frenetic pace through the New York of the flamboyant, alcohol-sodden Roaring Twenties. Although Patricia's wounds are raw and their exposition uncensored, Parrott (1899-1957), herself married four times, maintains humor, avoiding moroseness with chirpy details about clothing, millinery, the ubiquitous mixed drinks, street life. She shifts back and forth in her chronology, describing the last, explosive moments of Patricia's marriage to Peter as well as conjugal happiness, and the unwelcome solitude that follows in the wake of separation. Parrott's crystalline insight into the obsessions of women in their relations with men and with their insecurities is jarringly familiar today. Her work's contemporary quality is eerie and disturbing--although the scenery has changed, behavior patterns have not. (June)

New Yorker - Jessica Winter

Ex-Wife presented readers and critics with a new woman, one who was pursuing new vocational, economic, and romantic freedoms. She spent her days chasing a career, while her nights were a boozy smear of restaurants, speakeasies, and amorous encounters. She was exciting and discomfiting and morally questionable . . . But Ex-Wife, which is now being reissued (by McNally Editions) for the first time in more than thirty years, wasn’t the racy, frothy endorsement of cosmopolitan white women’s liberation that readers were primed to expect."

New York Times - Molly Young

I’m tempted to simply type out a list of quotations from this book and call it a day, adding only a ‘BUY IT NOW!’ button at the bottom . . . The approach [feels] too advanced even for now. How did Ursula Parrott do it? . . . We must conclude that she possessed supernatural gifts of insight, as well as a talent for acid aphorisms and peppery dialogue . . . This edition features a gorgeous introduction by Alissa Bennett . . . Read if you like: Being wicked, shopping, breakfast for dinner, bearing distress with dignity, Elizabeth Jane Howard’s The Cazalet Chronicles.

New York Times - Alexandra Jacobs

[Let us] revel in the surprising freshness of its prose . . . Ex-Wife depicted remarkable erotic freedom . . . The other thing that glows in Ex-Wife, and the biography of its author, is New York City: the lights, the fights, the freedoms, constraints and terrible costs."

Air Mail

"Take one shot of Dorothy Parker and two shots of Dawn Powell, stir briskly, add a sour cherry, and you have the intoxicating Ex-Wife."

New York Sun - Carl Rollyson

"Ex-Wife is every bit as engaging and thought-provoking as it was in 1929. The novel can be read as a period piece about the 1920s, the emergence of flappers and independent career women, but it is also an anatomy of a marriage and a divorce that takes a searing look at a conflicted woman . . . The novel’s passages on female friendship are as profound as Patricia’s efforts to become her own woman in the company of the men she desires."

New York Review of Books - Joyce Carol Oates

"Like Fitzgerald but from a woman’s perspective . . . Ex-Wife is a sharply observed, intimate account of a failed marriage, several failed love affairs, an abortion, numerous alcoholic interludes and one-night stands . .. as if Dorothy Parker, Noël Coward, and Oscar Wilde had collaborated to examine the war between the sexes in the post-Victorian era."

Vivian Gornick

"As it went on I found myself more and more moved by the writer's ability to render on the page the complexity of lost love coupled with the loss of first youth, and then second youth. Quite remarkable."

The Baffler   - Jessica Fletcher

"Deftly crafted, wryly observed, and thoroughly unsettling . . . Caught between Victorian sexual mores and the libertinism of interwar Greenwich Village, Patricia brings a gimlet eye to the pervasive misogyny and sexual hypocrisies of her generation."

from her Foreword - Alissa Bennett

"The first thing I wondered [reading Ex-Wife] is where it had been all my life . . . A shockingly anticipatory account of what it means to want and what it means to be left; we live in a world where most of us know the feeling of both."

Francine Prose

"Ursula Parrott’s Ex-Wife . . . gives us an idea of what it would be like to walk into [a] museum and or gallery and see a portrait of how we might have looked [then]: all of us dressed in stylish flapper clothes, swilling bootleg gin, chattering and flirting.

AnOther Magazine - Zsófia Paulikovics

"Told with a polished Jazz Age dandyism, Ex-Wife resonates at a subtle but unmissable emotional frequency, which is what makes it feel so contemporary. While reading, I found myself taking screenshots to send to friends of almost every page.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Adam Sobsey

"Ex-Wife might have been called something like God’s greatest gift to divorce. "

Product Details

BN ID: 2940191021683
Publisher: Tantor Audio
Publication date: 09/24/2024
Edition description: Unabridged
From the B&N Reads Blog

Customer Reviews