The First Wives Club

I cheated by accident and watched the film long before I read the novel, but not on purpose. I didn't even know that the film was based on a book!

Irregardless of any differences between the two mediums and plot changes, I highly enjoyed both. The film is a bit more comedic - largely due to the actors - and the book has a more wide-ranging revenge plan, but they are both centred around themes of female empowerment and the age old adage "a woman scorned..." I hope that this book is able to act as an inspiration for women who didn't grow up with my liberal ideas about male-female relationships, because no woman should be used and abused by a man (or anyone for that matter).

Don't get mad. Get everything.
When their best friend commits suicide over her divorce, Elise, Brenda and Annie decide enough is enough. Each was crucial to her husband's career. But now that the men are successful, they've traded in their wives for newer, blonder models.
Over lunch one day they form the First Wives Club. But this is no support group. This is the SAS in Chanel. Painstakingly, inexorably, they plan the downfall of the men who've wrecked their lives - and know that revenge has never tasted sweeter...

Each woman, united in their being spurned by their husbands - often for younger models - and having been to school together, come together after the fourth of their group commits suicide. They then conive to get back all that show more they think they deserve, having contributed much to their husbands' current way of living.

Much better than the film, (which I dont remember having Diane Keaton's daughter being Down Syndrome, or Goldie Hawn's aging actress being a dignified near 60 year old dypso getting a younger boyfriend, or Bette Midler ending up as a middle aged lesbian) the book is a little harder and edgier - and covers some subjects that mid 90s Hollywood is clearly not ready for. show less

If you've seen the film based on this, well, this is quite different in a lot of the details, and is much raunchier, darker, crueler, meaner and more vindictive. It's a breezy fast easy read despite its thick length, but although light in that sense, I'd hardly call it fluffy.

The novel follows three women: Elise Eliot Atchison, Annie MacDuggan Paradise and Brenda Morrelli Cushman are seemingly very different people. Elise, born to a WASPy rich, high society family, was a glamorous movie star in the Grace Kelly mold. Annie was the good Catholic "Mainline girl" who is thin, practical and proper. Brenda is a fat brassy, funny half-Sicilian and half-Jewish. But what all three have in common is that all of them are "first wives" dumped in show more middle age for young trophy wives and betrayed in various ways by their husbands. Elise is drinking too much, Brenda is eating too much, and Annie is trying to cope with crushing loneliness after sending off her teenaged Down's syndrome daughter to a residential home. Then Annie's receives a letter from an old friend, Cynthia, who just committed suicide--a letter that details the various betrayals of Cynthia's husband who had also discarded her for a younger woman. After Annie shares the letter with the others, they form "the First Wives Club" and vow revenge on Cynthia's ex-husbands and their own former spouses.

No one would mistake this book for great literature--I found particularly irritating the hard-to-read attempts at depicting a heavy Spanish accent with spellings like "dey," "ees," "chou," and "asseestant" and the tendency to overuse "Well" to begin sentences. At times what's set in motion by the three seems too vindictive. With the husbands, it's more justice than revenge, but the scheme targets the new spouses too, and in all but one case, the second wives seem to me more the next victim of the ex than evil women who should be taken down.

But I nevertheless found this rather trashy book a very entertaining read and I enjoyed watching the developing friendship among the women and their personal growth after their divorces. Set in late 1980s New York City, the novel is a bit like a caper story for chicks with all the satisfaction of seeing an elaborate revenge scheme come together. show less

I've always been a big believer of reading the book before watching the movie, but I've seen The First Wives Club movie several times and it's always something I turn on when it's on tv. So I thought the book must be as great as the movie. I couldn't have been more wrong.

The book isn't terrible, it's just not as fun and slap-stick comedy driven like the movie is. Everything is much darker and the things the men do is just repulsive in parts. Maybe it's also the time frame of when it was written (a la the early '90s) that some of the language seemed unnecessary and offensive. You can get your point across without having to use a derogatory term to describe someone. And most importantly, we get it, Brenda is fat. We don't need to be show more reminded of it every page.

For me, the best part was reading about the husbands and what was coming to them. Ultimately, this book could have been reduced by 100 pages and you wouldn't have missed much. Besides that, I think I'll stick with the movie. show less

Fun read, I love a good revenge. The characters were really one-dimensional, though: Annie was nice and boring, Brenda was fat and vulgar, Elise was rich and drunk. It was more dark and the bad guys were a lot more bad than in the movie. I would recommend it because I really did enjoy it, just wasn't crazy about it. The one thing that realllly bothered me was the totally unnecessary trip to Japan. They were literally there for one chapter, and it seemed to simply serve to educate the reader on Japanese history. Why?

Well, I still wouldn't call myself a fan of Chick Lit, but this wasn't bad summer reading. I think I liked it a bit better than the movie version.

I read this book years ago. I was a fan of the movie and thought I'd give the book a go. The book, in my opinion, was leaps and bounds better than the movie. The stories of each character including Cynthia went much deeper than the movie and it is definitely one i have been pushing onto people who enjoyed the movie.