Anonymous:The Bride Stripped Bare

Reviewed by Michele Hewitson*

LET us first strip Anonymous bare. The author is Nikki Gemmell, a British-based Australian writer whose identity was exposed before the book was published.

There is a postscript by Gemmell, setting out her reasons for wanting the book to be published anonymously.

She wanted to write "a scrupulously honest account of a woman's secret life, and the only way I felt comfortable doing that was to withhold my name".

"Secret life" means secret sex life: that of the good wife, the bride of the title.

Given that Gemmell was outed pre-publication, to insist on this ongoing author anonymity on the book's cover seems irritatingly coy.

And the bride's story is irritatingly predictable. Good wife is trapped in marriage to decent enough bloke who cannot satisfy her sexually, but who turns out to be doing the business okay with her best friend.

Good wife meets Gabriel, an unlikely virgin. They have sex a variety of ways, all explicitly explored on the page.

Can't blame her for that. The decent husband, Cole, is actually a creep. He re-irons his shirts after the cleaner has ironed them, he pays his wife an allowance. He tells his wife that her mother is "menopausal and mad and he fears you'll turn into her".

The characterisation is so slight that the impression left is one of headless bodies, writhing about.

And the coyness is continued with chapter headings taken from Victorian texts containing instructions on how to be a good woman, and wife. As in: "The importance of needlework and knitting."

If The Bride Stripped Bare is supposed to be a portrait of a modern marriage, of a woman's liberation from sexual constraints, it fails from the outset with its ugly depiction of a peculiarly old-fashioned marriage. You find yourself wishing that the good wife would give up devoting her energy to sexual liaisons with strangers and get herself a divorce lawyer. Now that might be liberating.

Michele Hewitson is a Herald columnist.

Fourth Estate, $24.99