Please welcome Julie Metz, author of the memoir Perfection
I was a four year old with a strong sense of purpose. When teachers, friends, parents of friends, anyone asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up I said without hesitation “an artist.” Usefully vague as a career goal, but in my mind it was something visual. I did go on to pursue a career in the visual arts, working as a graphic designer until dramatic life events, the kind I never thought would happen to me, got in the way of life as I knew it. Friends encouraged me to write and even more surprisingly I felt that I should and could write about these events in a way that would help me and others. That’s how my memoir Perfection came to be.
But what gave me any shred of confidence in my ability to write was that I had always been a great reader. Reading and books had always been a comfort since early childhood. My parents worked in publishing and they brought home books of all sorts. In their shelves I discovered Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, Dickens, and as I grew older and more adventurous I found the stash of eye-opening Henry Miller and D.H. Lawrence. I read voraciously in all genres: biographies and novels, books of myths and legends, books with pictures, even the dictionary. Holding a book is still a comfort, the feel of the paper, the smell of the ink, the weight of the object. I cannot go to sleep without reading, or at least pretending to read a page or two.
I admit that I am old-fashioned—I do not yet own an e-reader. It’s hard for me to imagine loving such an gadget, though a recent move brought home the reality that I cannot continue to cart my library around endlessly, seventy boxes worth, including paperback novels from my childhood, printed on cheap wood pulp paper that has been crumbling since the 1970s (C.S. Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia and Lawrence Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, with cover art by Peter Max. Oy!) Of the many books I loved as a child, I remember a few in particular, probably because I still own the books. When I was ten or so, I was laid up with a horrific case of the mumps. It was so painful that I still wince thinking about the horrible week in bed, unable to swallow much of anything. That my brother lay in similar pain in the matching twin bed across the room was some comfort—we shared all our childhood diseases.
A thoughtful family friend sent over a copy of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women. The book was a hardback edition, with a beautifully illustrated cover, gold stamping, an attached ribbon bookmark, the whole nine yards. For an introverted kid, sick in bed this turned out to be an ideal novel—mostly about emotional life, not so very much happens and there is a good deal of talking. I continue to like books like this and movies as well. I wonder if this book still speaks to young women now…I was saddened when my own daughter told me in her polite way that she found it boring when I gave her my copy. I was discouraged until she picked up two books I had loved as a teen: Dodie Smith’s bittersweet romance I Capture the Castle and Gone with the Wind (“ Mom! This is the best book EVER!”). Watching her carry around Margaret Mitchell’s 1000 page novel made me hopeful that there will always be room in peoples’ lives for a great story, wonderfully told.
Perfection is available now
A breathtakingly honest, gloriously written memoir about the complexities of forgiveness when a young widow discovers her husband’s secret life after his death. Julie Metz seemed to have the perfect life–an adoring if demanding husband, a happy, spirited daughter, a lovely old house in an idyllic town outside New York City–when in an instant, everything changed. Her charismatic, charming husband, Henry, suffered a pulmonary embolism and collapsed on the kitchen floor. Within hours he was dead, and Julie was a widow and single mother at 44. Just like that, what seemed like a perfect life melted away. But the worst was yet to come.
Six months after his death, Julie discovered that her husband of 12 years, the man who loved her and their six-year-old daughter ebulliently and devotedly, had been unfaithful throughout their marriage, going so far as to conduct an ongoing relationship with one of Julie’s close friends. This memoir–moving, simple, filled with incandescent images–is the story of coming to terms with painful truths, of rebuilding both a life and an identity after betrayal and widowhood. Ultimately, it is a story of rebirth and happiness–if not perfection.
