My Husband by Maud Ventura

Format: eBook
Read: July 2025

Wow, this book was something! I’m very excited about it, you can tell because I included quotes!

The story follows the events of a single week in the domestic life of a French family. We are in the point of view of the wife (no name), a beautiful and wealthy woman in her forties with two children and a husband she has an all-consuming obsession with. This is capital O Obsessed, her every thought and action revolves around this man to a frankly terrifying degree!

At the beginning, I had no idea where it was going to end. It does start off slow and a little bit repetitive, in the way that real life is, but if you stick with it, I think this is a masterclass in slowly increasing tension as we learn, bit by bit, just how unhinged this lady really is!

You won’t like the wife, so if you need to like a protagonist, walk away! I alternated between wondering WTF is wrong with her, being worried for her, then being worried for her children and her husband, to wishing she could get away and find a healthier way to live!

To be in love

At the core of her psyche is this idea that love should be all-consuming, passionate and obsessive. I’m sure we are all familiar with this from books, TV shows and movies we’ve grown up with. To be in love is to have butterflies in your stomach, to feel the spark and fireworks! You know what gives you butterflies? Stress and anxiety! And this idea of love is how so many women end up in relationships with men that treat them like shit.

When it comes to love, I’ve learned nothing. I’ve been reliving the same scenario ever since I was a teenager: I love too intensely and I’m consumed by my own love (analysis, jealousy, doubt)—so much so that when I’m in love, I always end up slightly extinguished and saddened. When I love, I become harsh, serious, intolerant. A heavy shadow settles over my relationships. I love and want to be loved with so much gravitas that it quickly becomes exhausting (for me, for the other person). It’s always an unhappy kind of love.

At one point, the wife describes a previous relationship, one she left because she thought it lacked passion.

There was only one exception: Adrien. For the first time in my life, I was with a man who loved me more than I loved him. Two years with Adrien, going to sleep before him every night; two years with no sadness but also with no passion.

What I have found is that love is, in truth, the absence of any anxiety about my relationship! It is feeling safe and happy with my husband!

The wife has taken this idea of what being in love means and made it her entire being. Consequently, she has consumed every piece of terrible advice given to women by magazines and advice columns in the last fifty years.

I’ve had to maintain my blond with brightening products that I hide so my husband doesn’t suspect anything. I also don’t tell him when I go to the hairdresser for highlights or a root touch-up. I don’t know if my husband is aware of my natural color.

She has been with this man for fifteen years and has never gone to the bathroom within his hearing!

Unreliable narrator

As an unreliable narrator, she’s really interesting. She scrutinises every little tiny word, action and gesture to such a degree that perspective is impossible! Is her husband cruel? Is he just mediocre? Is he actually a good husband, and is she her own problem? Does she even actually love him? Is any of this even about him?

Many other lovely little details to heighten the sense of someone grasping for control. The day of the week structure works well; they are familiar and reliable, but while time marches forward, they are also circular and repetitive. Then comes the idea that each day of the week has a colour, and the colour has meaning. Naturally, the meaning of some days is more positive than others, creating something to look forward to but also dread. This paints a background layer, which I found simultaneously comforting and disturbing, cycling way behind to all the other compulsive thoughts that occupy the wife’s inner life.

The idea behind “let you go” is pleasant; there’s even something reassuring about it. It’s a fiction that I, too, would like to believe in. Absorbed in my translation, I wonder if that expression, so difficult to translate into French, testifies to the fact that English-speakers love differently than us.

Another wonderful layer to this book is that the wife works as an English teacher with a side job of translating written works into English. The work of translating into a different language while still trying to retain the original meaning is honestly something I’d never really considered before, even though I have read quite a few translated works (side note: I should create a tag for that!) – including this one, which was originally written in French (ahh, another delicious layer!)! I enjoyed those little insights in her work, and how it may feed into her habit of over analysing the meaning of every little thing (the clementine!). It is also another way in which she sacrifices her own voice. She writes but she is always a vessel for others.

This is also a book with a fucking great ending! I was not prepared for it, I keep thinking about it. I’m not doing to say more than that.

I’ll leave you with one thing on which the wife and I agree!

I’ve always hated children who talk too loudly. The decibel level that is socially acceptable for children has always seemed excessive to me.

I would definitely read more from this author, apparently this is her debut!