Search Heartache

Search Heartache

by Carla Malden
Search Heartache

Search Heartache

by Carla Malden

Paperback

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Overview

When I got home, I did what I had stopped myself from doing earlier. I Googled the name: Aimee Laroche. I wondered what I would have done if I had found myself embroiled in this scenario fifteen, even ten years ago. Would I have hired a private detective to track this woman down? Would I have passed sleepless nights waiting for him to hand over a manila envelope containing long lens black-and-whites of a femme fatale smoking Gauloises at a sidewalk café? Probably not. But Googling was irresistible. Like everything on screen, it required no effort. It was so easy.

Maura Fielder looks like she has the perfect life: every expectation fulfilled. But under the illusory surface of perfection, Maura finds herself blindsided by what she discovers on her husband’s computer. She has no emotional cubby hole into which she can shove this ghost from her husband’s past, so instead, Maura upends her life—thrashing her marriage, alienating her daughter, and eroding her own moral center. On the verge of sacrificing everything she holds dear to her own obsession, how does Maura manage to regain her equilibrium and reclaim her life?

In this post-privacy new world, any woman can find heartache if she searches hard enough.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781644283608
Publisher: Rare Bird Books
Publication date: 08/08/2023
Pages: 312
Product dimensions: 8.50(w) x 5.50(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Raised in Los Angeles, Carla Malden began her career working in motion picture production and development before becoming a screenwriter.

Along with her father, Academy Award winning actor Karl Malden, she co-authored his critically acclaimed memoir When Do I Start?

More recently, Malden published Afterimage: A Brokenhearted Memoir of A Charmed Life, her own fiercely personal account of battling the before and surviving the after of losing her first husband to cancer. Afterimage is a journey through grief to gratitude that alerts an entire generation: this is not your mother’s widowhood.

Carla’s feature writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, highlighting the marvels and foibles of Southern California and Hollywood. She sits on the Board of the Geffen Playhouse. Search Heartache is her first novel.

Carla Malden lives in Brentwood with her husband and ten minutes (depending on traffic) from her daughter.

Reading Group Guide

If you found your husband/boyfriend looking at an old sex tape, how would you react? Does Maura overreact? Is her reaction understandable? What other factors contribute to her reaction?

If Maura were your friend, how would you advise her?

What would have happened if Maura had kept her mouth shut and never told Adam she saw him watching the tape? How would their marriage/life have been affected?

Is there marriage better or worse because of the events of the book?

How does virtual infidelity compare with real-life infidelity?

Who has the bigger job of forgiveness?

Why the title?

What would the story be from Adam’s point of view?

How do you think men would react to this book? What would they say it is “about?”

How has Maura changed by the end of the book?

What would happen if she came upon Adam looking at another old sex tape?

Why is this story set in Los Angeles? Could it have been set somewhere else? If so, how would that have made it different?

Did this book challenge your assumptions about anything? About marriage?

Did the book change your perspective on anything? Marriage? Infidelity? The role of the internet in your household?

If Adam had not returned home at the end and they had stayed separated or gotten divorced, what would Maura have done? What would her life have become?

What do you think is the significance of Mick Jagger in the book?

What do you think is the significance of the Ridgepoint School for Girls in the book? And in Maura’s life?

How did the past shape Maura?

What does the scene with Maura’s parents tell us?

What happens when Maura and Adam wake up the next morning after the ending?

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