cover image The Coach's Wife: A Memoir

The Coach's Wife: A Memoir

Teresa Godwin Phelps. W. W. Norton & Company, $23 (255pp) ISBN 978-0-393-03470-7

When Phelps recalls her achievement--earning her undergraduate and doctorate degrees at Notre Dame and becoming a tenured professor in the law school there--her tone is crisp and her view of the university is objective. But when she writes about her husband Digger (she calls him Dick), his career as the basketball coach of the Fighting Irish, the ignominious way he was dumped in 1990 after 19 years and, above all, the sense of ``family'' the Phelpses developed in South Bend, the pages become sodden with tears. Still, the memoir provides an affecting and revealing picture of the vicissitudes of the life of a coach's wife at a major university, by a woman flexible enough to have an accomplished academic career of her own while also successfully filling the role of what sportswriters describe as a ``lovely wife.'' Photos not seen by PW. (Jan.)