A single woman comes home one day to find a strange man in her apartment claiming to be her husband. When she sends him up to her attic to fetch something, a different man comes down, also apparently her husband.
I was really excited to read this book by Holly Gramazio because I had heard so many wonderful things about it, and the concept sounded hilarious.
There are some funny moments, but overall, the book isn’t nearly as funny as I was expecting. Instead, it’s a much more thoughtful book about the choices we make, and the ripple effects those choices have.
Throughout the course of this book, the main character, Lauren, goes through more than 100 different husbands. Some of them she sends right back up to the attic for various reasons. Others she keeps for a few days or weeks.
Each time she gets a new husband, Lauren doesn’t just have to investigate the husband. She has to investigate her whole life. What job does she have? What friends does she have? What does their apartment look like? How’s their bank account doing?
Even if a husband is a hard pass when he comes down the ladder from the attic, Lauren is usually willing to at least give them a chance because a) everyone deserves a chance, and b) she recognizes that some version of herself chose to marry this man, so she’s willing to explore what about him would make her do that.
As much as I loved the idea of simply sending a man you don’t like back up to the attic to get rid of him, it’s not always that easy. Two husbands don’t actually live in the apartment for various reasons, so she has to use her imagination, and in one case, go to some rather extreme lengths to get rid of them. Both instances made the book much darker than I was expecting.
SPOILER ALERT!!!
I almost gave up on this book until she gets a husband who only sticks around for a few hours before volunteering to go back up into the attic for a flimsy reason. As he’s getting ready to go back up, she realizes he’s stuck in the same situation she’s stuck in. That was interesting enough to reel me back in.
The end up agreeing to spend a month or two together for the sake of having someone else who knows what they’re going through and being able to talk about it openly.
While Lauren is always in her apartment with the magical attic, Bohai is originally from Australia, but has been bouncing around the world, always showing up in someone else’s house, usually in their cupboard or pantry.
He’s bisexual, so sometimes he’s married to a man and other times he’s married to a woman. He genuinely fell in love with one of his husbands and stayed with him for a few years, but the husband got in a car crash and his chances weren’t looking good. So Bohai climbed into the pantry to go live a new life and give his husband his best chance at living another life without him, because at least he would get to live.
Once Bohai goes back into the attic (for real this time) they agree to keep in touch. Lauren’s contact information doesn’t change from one husband to the next, but Bohai’s number tends to change, so he memorizes Lauren’s number so he can reach her when he gets to his new life. His email address does tend to stay the same, so sometimes they communicate that way.
Bohai eventually finds himself with a wife who’s cheating on him, but he’s managed to fall in love with someone else he found in that world, so he proposes to her and he fully plans to stick around this time.
Because Bohai travels around the world and is bisexual, he has more potential partners, so he’s never repeated a partner, whereas Lauren repeats a couple of her partners, include Amos, the asshole she broke up with months before her attic started sending her husbands.
The first time Amos comes down from the attic, she sends him right back up.
The second time Amos comes down, she tells him they should see other people, and he informs her they’re already in the process of getting divorced.
So Lauren spends some time dealing with the divorce, getting back on the dating scene, enjoying being single, before sending Amos back up the ladder, which is easier said than done when you’re in the process of divorcing someone who has already moved out of your apartment, and I saw absolutely no reason for it.
That’s your way out of this whole mess. Why do you need a husband? You’ve had more than 100 and have not liked any of them enough to keep them. So why not just go back to husband hunting the old fashioned way? Why do you need an attic to send you husbands in the first place?
The more I think about it, the more I think that’s my problem with this book. It feels like something written by someone who is tired of dating and just wants the universe to send her a husband. Any husband.
As someone who is happily single, I just can’t relate to that.