Stacey Freeman

I Bought My Husband’s Mistress Lingerie by Stacey Freeman was a page turning quick and enjoyable read. The book is a collection of several dozen essays on her life, both as a wife and, subsequently, as a single parent to three youngsters. Each essay is short and can be quickly read in just a few minutes. But that does not mean they are shallow. Anything but. The raw emotion permeates, page after page.

This is by no means a “feel sorry for me” kind of book, but more of a “how I dealt with and conquered adversity” type of book. The essays are honest, emotional, sometimes sad, sometimes funny, accounts of the ups and downs of life after divorce while raising three young children with their father living 8,000 miles away.

Interspersed with humor, Freeman shows her positive attitude in life, even when being stranded on the side of the road for five hours after dark. She perseveres through even the most difficult situations, including dates with several Mr. Wrongs.

I highly recommend this book. I cannot imagine why anyone will not thoroughly enjoy it.… (more)

I’m sure the process of getting this book together was therapeutic and good for the author, but it wasn’t as good for the reader. I started this book one day, read it, and when I had to come back to it after going to bed for the night, the second dive in was painfully worse. Managed to get through about two thirds of the book and it was a tough ask to jump back in again.

It probably was very helpful to get everything this author went though down on paper, but it felt, at times, pathetic. And maybe divorce makes you that way, but for those keeping track as the “what are we being compared to,” in the patriarchal system: today’s is heels of bread. I don’t need the depression. Or the sadness. This trash human of an ex husband shouldn’t be mourned over the loss of anything — he sucks.

There are chapters, and I will say it’s more journal entry than chapter, but chapters that just feel so pitiful and sad, and then some actual growth, but it vacillates wildly between what is never defined as a linear timeline. A sixteen year marriage is nothing to diminish — however there is a story in here that three years after the divorce is final, and who knows how long that was after the infidelity, the main character messed up her own vacation, with her kids, over him. And that’s how the book ends. It’s very unfulfilling and depressing.

I just hope the author is using this as a final purge of “woe is me,” and moving on. Her bio at the end doesn’t have much in the way of interests or hobbies, but she runs her own consulting firm, which is pretty girl-boss of her. Reading this and hearing that just does not compute.

Maybe the aim was to come in as, trod upon, look at what I did, what I gave for everything, but wouldn’t you want there to be some, either 1) comeuppance to the evil villain, and/or 2) major shift or growth in that Oliver Twist-esque, previously annoying but now glow up, lead. This book just simply leaves the reader thinking, if your ex husband cheated on you and remarried (and impregnated) without so much as a second thought, if he didn’t matter, and you write your character as such, why should the reader?… (more)