Secret Life of Eva Hathaway — Janice Weber

A chick lit classic first published in 1985, The Secret Life of Eva Hathaway returns, hilarious and wicked as ever, for a new generation of fans. “I love my husband. The man married me when he didn't even have to. Then he set me up in a huge house to domesticate the kinks out of my system while he ran his computer company.” So begins the saga of Eva Hathaway, the randy heroine who leaves a raft of heartbroken suitors when she elopes with entrepreneur Martin Weaver and moves from New York to Boston. Martin's frequent road trips provide Eva with the calm necessary to pursue her stellar career as Fanny May Tingle, award winning composer of hymns. Despite the lingering disapproval of her blueblood mother-in-law Ruth, who would love a grandchild, Eva's marriage to Martin succeeds for four placid years. She assuages her homesickness for Manhattan with visits to Richard Weintraub, who designs artwork for her hymns, and Lionel Boyd, a high school confidante now a gay Broadway costume designer. As Martin's absences become prolonged and a void grows inside, Eva manages to stay on the straight and narrow by composing nonstop, working out, and parrying the ravings of her alcoholic mother Chuck. Eva's formula seems to work until, one snowy afternoon, she goes to the Y for a course in self-defense. Instructor Paul Fox, a moonlighting tenor, at once identifies his new pupil as half insane, half genius, and 200% nymphomaniac. After several false starts that would make The Taming of the Shrew look like a christening, Fox and Eva connect...to put it mildly. Conscience, lust, guilt, and that odd duck, joy, clash in a bawdy and hilarious comedy, a moving love story, and a social satire that continues to reverberate with today's reader.