Book Review: After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book #10 of 2023:

After I Do by Taylor Jenkins Reid

One-and-a-half stars, begrudgingly rounded up for my enjoyment of the heroine’s extended family. I nearly quit this book several times, and it’s by far my least favorite of the five Taylor Jenkins Reid titles I’ve now read. The characters are decently fleshed-out, and the basic premise of a couple realizing their marriage is in trouble and embarking on a one-year trial separation is an interesting hook. But they’re both such awful, destructive people to each other and themselves that I’ve found it impossible to stay invested in their respective happiness and the question of whether they’ll ultimately find it by staying apart or getting back together.

I think for the structure of this piece to work, we would need to see that Lauren and Ryan used to be great partners, that they’re currently in crisis, and that they eventually manage to improve again. And although the writer does provide initial flashbacks to their eleven-year romantic history, their dynamic feels aggressive and off-putting to me all throughout. They’ve sunk to a new low at the story’s start only in that they’ve become outwardly hostile and resentful, but they were already belittling and picking fights with one another on their honeymoon! There are no good times to ever return to — which could still be the setup to a solid narrative, but it’s not the one we’re presented with here. Instead, all the talk is on these ex-lovers recapturing a magic that I’m not convinced was real in the first place.

And they’re no better further into the experiment, either. While separated, she logs into his inbox and reads his emails, including the unsent drafts addressed to her. (Some folks in her life call her out on this blatant invasion of privacy, but she keeps doing it and appears to be reassured by her friend’s bizarre victim-blaming logic that if he really wanted to shield those messages from her, he would have changed his password.) He later confesses some wildly inappropriate and violent thoughts, like that he wants to punch a wall every time she suggests getting international food like pho or that he’s had dreams of killing her new boyfriend, despite the hypocritical fact that he’s now dating someone else at that point too. Please save these things for therapy, sir! At least his domestic abuse stays mostly inside his head; she actually does throw a vase across the room at him just before they decide to try splitting up.

I don’t require protagonists in fiction to be perfect. Most of the time, their flaws render them more believably human and feed a stronger drama around them. Yet for the thrust of a novel to be about nominally recognizing and addressing such faults, it’s galling to see no evidence of personal growth whatsoever. I guess by the end both spouses have learned that they should communicate better and make fewer assumptions about what the other one is thinking? But this is not a revelation that seems remotely earned in the text.

★★☆☆☆

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