Vow: A Memoir of Marriage and Infidelity

A painfully told autopsy of her chronic unfaithfulness throughout her 18-year marriage becomes in the hands of freelance journalist Plump an excruciating exercise in self-realization. The discovery in 2005 that her husband, Bill, a corporate financial manager, had a mistress and small child living one mile from their home in Brandywine, Pa., moved Plump's already shaky marriage "into a new circle of deceit." Married in 1987, Plump had, early on and before the birth of her two sons, fallen into a pattern of infidelity with three other men, even revealing at one point her transgression to her husband. The marriage remained intact even after subsequent affairs by Bill ("He had an affinity for strippers"), culminating in Bill's 10-year relationship with Susan and out-of-wedlock child whom he managed to keep secret for a long time. Plump gradually reveals the degree of self-deception the two married people practiced over many years, as mismatched needs and gnawing mistrust fed their mutual appetite for risk, sex, and guilt. "What I wanted most, what drove me in every affair I had," she writes, "was the drug and energy of passion, of new intimacy." Plump manages in this frank memoir to fully capture her life%E2%80%94and woman, wife, and mother%E2%80%94who leaves nothing unexamined and has nothing left to lose. (Feb.)