“Sometimes I think about joining the military,” Simone Gorrindo’s boyfriend, Andrew, tells her early in their relationship.
“I would leave you,” Gorrindo says.
But six years later, Andrew is on a mission with a special operations unit in Afghanistan, and the couple, now married, have moved from their Manhattan apartment to a rented house in Columbus, Ga., near Fort Benning.
Gorrindo’s memoir, “The Wives,” tells the story of the years she spent adjusting to a new culture and to a new role: military wife. Arriving in Columbus with an editing background and a master’s in journalism, she’s immediately attuned to the language that keeps her subservient: “I didn’t want to be a dependent, my presence in this world sponsored. But dependent I was. Already, my days revolved around waiting for him to call.”
Those days are hot and long. There are loops in the park. Bike rides to the Piggly Wiggly, where groceries cost too much. And there are those Gorrindo is left with for company: the wives.
But despite its title, “The Wives” is a self-portrait. We meet the other women and share in Gorrindo’s deepening connections with her own unit. But even as Gorrindo becomes one of the wives, she remains an observer.
We learn that this stance is a familiar one for the author, who grew up in Marin County surrounded by privilege but not of it. Her parents struggled to make ends meet; they fought; her mother drank. As a child, Gorrindo would wait by the window for her mother, fearing the worst and “willing her to arrive.” Twenty years later in Columbus, Gorrindo uneasily occupies the same spot, waiting for Andrew “to come home every night, the way I did with my mom.”
Gorrindo’s prose is inviting and fluid, and her storytelling is intimate and vivid. But while she renders her own history with insight, the other wives are drawn with less nuance. Rachel, who starts out as Gorrindo’s across-the-street neighbor, is the fullest presence on the page, especially once Gorrindo becomes pregnant. (The book is excellent on severe anxiety during pregnancy.)
Gorrindo feels “betrayed” every time Andrew leaves for a deployment; she longs for her own version of the “jittery aliveness” that characterizes his days. And as time goes on, all of the deferral — both to a culture and of her own needs — changes her. One afternoon, at a book club, another wife announces that she has “no voice” with her husband. “In the past, I probably would have spoken up,” Gorrindo writes. “‘You should have a voice,’ I would have said, softly or stridently, depending on my mood. But now I sat silent.”
As I read Gorrindo’s memoir, I kept thinking of other wife books like “Lives of the Wives” or “Wifedom” or “Parallel Lives”; the kind of books that foreground the unseen intellectual or creative contributions of women attached to male writers or artists. A military wife, too, offers support for her husband’s work. But it is a different kind of unseen labor. What comes across powerfully in Gorrindo’s telling is the labor of accommodation and compliance.
In time Gorrindo refinds her own voice and ultimately she confronts Andrew — a changed Andrew, both more filled out and more beat-up, an Andrew who chews tobacco and owns a gun: His whole life, she charges, “is designed to keep me from actually knowing you, and the way the Unit expects me to be, all quiet and capable and resilient, is designed to keep you from knowing me. Do you know how that makes me feel?”
In couples therapy, they successfully work on their personal problems. It’s less clear how Gorrindo addresses a philosophical one. She tells us she’d “pushed the boundaries of my own beliefs and ethics to make an extremely conflicted peace with my husband’s work.” This struggle is mostly offstage. What we see is her distance from that work.
In a memorable scene, the wives gather at a Marriott for a lecture by a military psychologist. He’s speaking to them as an expert — on their husbands. There’s some initial laughter about how the military selects for sociopaths. But as the psychologist continues, noting that compartmentalization, the skill that serves the men well on the battlefield, “doesn’t always translate so well to being a spouse,” the room grows still. “I spotted one young woman actually taking notes. Our husbands were the maddening puzzles at the center of our lives, and this man understood them.”
Away from their wives — in dramatic, unseen landscapes; on secret, dangerous missions — the husbands are changing. But back at home, their wives are changing, too, and Gorrindo argues for the importance of their transformations in her engaging, evocative memoir.
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