At 27, newly married and working her dream job as an editor in New York City, Simone Gorrindo thought she had found the home and sense of belonging she’d always yearned for. Then, when her husband joined an elite combat unit in the army, she quit her job to follow him to a town in Georgia, and, two weeks later, he deployed to Afghanistan. Home had never felt so far away.
Enter the wives.
There is an old adage in the Army: “If we wanted you to have a family, we would have issued you one.” But in Simone’s husband’s unit, family was borderline essential, the soldiers’ gravitational force. “They can do what they do because of you,” the commanding officers told the spouses. The women were given memos on how to be wives during and after deployments. Their primary assignment was silence. Don’t let on where your husband is, what he does for a living. On monitored phone calls: don’t ask him when he’ll be home, or why he seems as distant as the moon. And so, their lives became secrets they only shared with one another. Despite their radical differences, the other wives became Simone’s unlikely home.
THE WIVES offers an intimate and stereotype-smashing look into the inner world of a remarkable and invisible group of women. At once a stirring portrait of a marriage and a timely coming-of-age story, Simone’s memoir is a testament to the people who shape us in the moments we need them the most—and an unforgettable reminder of the power of our shared humanity in the face of the unknown.
